Neurobiologists using cutting-edge visualisation techniques have revealed how changes across our synapses and neurons unfold.The findings depict how information is processed in our brain’s circuitry, offering insights for neurological disorders and brain-like AI systems.
How do we learn something new? How do tasks at a new job, lyrics to the latest hit song or directions to a friend’s house become encoded in our brains?
The broad answer is that our brains undergo adaptations to accommodate new information. To follow a new behaviour or retain newly introduced information, the brain’s circuitry changes.
Such modifications are orchestrated across trillions of synapses — the connections between individual nerve cells, called neurons — where brain communication takes place.
In an intricately coordinated process, new information causes certain synapses to get stronger with new data while others grow weaker. Neuroscientists who have closely studied these alterations, known as “synaptic plasticity,” have identified numerous molecular processes causing such plasticity.
Yet an understanding of the “rules” selecting which synapses undergo this process remained unknown, a mystery that ultimately dictates how learned information is captured in the brain.
University of California, San Diego neurobiologists William “Jake” Wright, Nathan Hedrick and Takaki Komiyama have now uncovered key details about this process.
The main financial support for this multi-year study was provided by several National Institutes of Health research grants and a training grant.