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Neurobiology

Caught in the act

Nature volume 424, pages 377–378 (2003)Cite this article

Researchers may have seen the signature of a memory in the making. In monkeys that learnt to associate two stimuli, single neurons changed their responses before, during or after learning became evident.

When Captain Lemuel Gulliver visited Balnibarbi, he was fortunate enough to be allowed into the hall of Speculative Learning at the Academy of Lagado, where, with great admiration, he watched how the nuts and bolts of a knowledge machine generated new sentences of great wisdom in real time1. Neurobiologists can only envy him to this day. How nice it would be to watch biological learning machines in action, and see how experience is converted into a memory trace. In the real world, this is more easily wished for than done. Writing in Science, however, Wirth and colleagues2 have moved a step closer to this goal. Their report is of particular interest because it gives fresh insight into the activity of the hippocampus — part of the brain machinery that forms and stores declarative (consciously accessible) memories, and a focus of attention for experimenters, clinicians and theoreticians alike3.

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Yadin Dudai

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  1. Yadin Dudai
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Dudai, Y. Caught in the act. Nature 424, 377–378 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/424377a

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