Forming New Short-term Memories (2)

Professor Ron Davis describes how memories are formed through the addition of new synapses.

The importance of this observation is the fact that many of us in the past, many of us in the field of learning and memory, have thought that memories formed through the strength of synapses. For example, if we learned about an odor, we might perceive an odor and that might be represented by the activity of a certain set of synapses. After we learned about the odor, we have imagined, and there's evidence for this, that the magnitude of the synaptic activity changes. So they increase their activity. What we’ve demonstrated, is this is a different type of how memories are formed, basically it’s not through a change in the magnitude of synaptic activity but it’s the addition of new synapses into the representation of that sensory information.