Author Description

To understand how the brain learns and remembers requires an integration of psychological concepts and behavioral methods with mechanisms of synaptic plasticity and systems neuroscience. The Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Third Edition, provides a synthesis of this interdisciplinary field. Each chapter makes the key concepts transparent and accessible to a reader with minimal background in either neurobiology or psychology and is extensively illustrated with full-color photographs and figures depicting important concepts and experimental data. The goal of this book remains the same as it was for the previous editions-to present a story of how memories are made. The story has three major parts, which have been expanded to include new chapters or reorganized to incorporate new findings and concepts. Part One explores the molecular basis of the synaptic changes that support memory. It begins with an overview of memory from the perspective of the brain. It next describes the long-term potentiation methodology used to study how synapses are modified and concepts needed to understand the organization of synapses. The remaining chapters are organized around the idea that the synaptic changes that support long-term potentiation evolve in four overlapping stages referred to as (a) generation, (b) stabilization, (c) consolidation, and (d) maintenance. The goal of each chapter is to reveal that each stage depends on unique molecular processes and to describe what they are. There are now separate chapters on the generation and stabilization of long-term memory and the chapter Consolidating LTP: Specific Mechanisms has been extensively revised to give proper treatment to the local events in the dendritic spine region that consolidate memories. Part Two builds on this foundation to show how molecules and cellular processes that have been identified from studies of synaptic plasticity also participate in the making of memories. It discusses some of the basic conceptual