Long-term Potentiation and Learning

Professor Seth Grant discusses the complicated relationship between long-term potentiation and learning/memory.

The relationship between the physiological process known as long-term potentiation and long-term depression to the behavioral process of learning is a highly controversial and exciting area of research. Long before the electrophysiology was discovered, it was proposed, back in the late 1900’s in fact, that the change in the efficiency of synapses could be a very good way to store information in the nervous system. Many decades after that, electrophysiological investigators found such a phenomenon. However there is a number of reasons to query it’s real central role in learning and memory, and I have to say that at the moment it’s unclear if it’s THE mechanism or the only mechanism involved with learning. There is a number of circumstances where enhancements in long term potentiation are associated with impaired learning, and there’s impairments in long-term potentiation associated with enhanced learning. So there’s not a perfect correlation between the two phenomena, which is one of the reasons it remains controversial.