Forming New Short-term Memories (3)

Professor Ron Davis explains that short-term memories are formed by recruiting new synapses. It is unknown whether long-term memories are formed in the same way.

So the observation we made in terms of recruitment of new synapses into the representation of an odor – this is the basis for how memories are formed. This was made for very short-term memories. The recruitment only lasted a very, very short period – minutes. Now clearly we, and fruit flies, can remember for hours and even days, so this is inadequate to account for long-term memories. So long-term memories could form through the same mechanisms just through more enduring changes or there might be completely different mechanisms used for the formation of long-term memories.