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Neurobiology

The shaky trace

Nature volume 406, pages 686–687 (2000)Cite this article

Penelope would have been sad indeed had she realized that each time she was reminded of her beloved Odysseus — away from home for so many years after the Trojan war1 — she could entirely lose her precious memory of him. Fortunately this was also unknown to her pushy suitors. But now Nader and colleagues, writing on page 722 of this issue2, have made it public. Recollection, they claim, is a dangerous matter: whenever we bring a memory to mind, it may turn shaky and slip into oblivion.

Most memories, like humans and wines, do not mature instantly. Instead they are gradually stabilized in a process referred to as consolidation3,4. Newly formed memory traces are sensitive to a variety of brain injuries and drugs, but after they have been consolidated they become more resistant to these treatments. Consolidation takes place at many levels of organization and complexity in the brain, and its overall kinetics depends on the type of memory involved. We know most about what happens in individual nerve cells and synapses — the points of communication between neurons — once they have been recruited to consolidate a memory.

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References

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  1. Department of Neurobiology The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100, Israel

    Yadin Dudai

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  1. Yadin Dudai
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Correspondence to Yadin Dudai.

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Dudai, Y. The shaky trace. Nature 406, 686–687 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35021168

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