Forming New Short-term Memories (1)

Professor Ron Davis discusses how his lab observed that short term memories are formed through the recruitment of new synapses.

One of the more recent observations we made is that short-term memories in the fruit fly are formed through the recruitment of new synapses into how sensory information is represented. So, as we (or any animal) learns environmental information or sensory information such as olfactory information, odors, or visual information it’s represented by the activity of synapses in the brain. So we perceive an odor and there are certain numbers of synapses that become activated that represent a specific odor. After we have learned something about that odor, we have discovered that new synapses are added to that representation of the odor.