The US Presidential Election illustrates the dynamic and plastic world in which we live. One minute you're a winner and the next it seems you're not. The dynamic nature of the brain is a central theme in modern neuroscience and can be seen at many levels in this issue. Slepnev and De Camilli provide a scholarly account of the complex cell biology of synaptic vesicle recycling, and Luo continues this theme with his synthesis of the fast moving field of Rho GTPases and their regulation of neuronal morphogenesis through the actin cytoskeleton. Van Praag, Kempermann and Gage's discussion of the neural consequences of environmental enrichment highlights plasticity at the behavioural level. Many will pause and consider their laboratory housing conditions after reading this latter article. But perhaps the most dramatic example of the dynamic nature of information processing in the brain is that of memory. By one popular account, memories are particularly labile shortly after learning, but become more stable after consolidation into long-term memory. Recent data from Nader, Schafe and LeDoux challenge this view by showing that evoking a long-term memory renders it temporarily vulnerable to disruption. This finding created a lot of interest and might have profound implications for our current views on memory consolidation. Intriguingly, there were several antecedents to this (re)discovery of reconsolidation. The Perspective section in this issue therefore contains a series of commentaries and a reply from Nader and colleagues on this topic. The goal is not to review the field, as this would be premature. Rather, we wish to alert the community to the old reconsolidation literature and the thoughts of those who have contributed to it. The aim of this section is to provide a forum for informal analysis — we hope that it also illustrates the dynamic nature of theoretical development. In science as in elections — it ain't over till all the votes are counted.