Hebbian Plasticity and Long-Term Potentiation
The strengthening of a connection between brain cells with use, a working picture of how experience changes the brain.
What it is
Donald Hebb proposed that when one neuron helps drive another, the connection between them strengthens with use. Long-term potentiation, found in the hippocampus in the 1970s, is the lasting strengthening that now serves as the working example. Robert Sapolsky describes it in Behave through added and more sensitive receptors and stronger release of signal.
In effect
The article on engrams cites Sapolsky's description of long-term potentiation as the kind of cell change that experience can leave.
What it does not say
It describes one mechanism of change and does not say that it alone accounts for a memory.
Sources
- Sapolsky, R. Behave.