What is "synapses"

Usage examples of "synapses".

For instance, the morphologists Mary Chen and Craig Bailey have spent several years studying and measuring the synapses of the Aplysia abdominal ganglion.

For memory modelers it is therefore particularly rich in offering the possibility of playing with hebb-type learning rules in synapses whose connections are genuinely understood rather than merely guessed at.

Nonetheless, despite these radical changes in design, the basic cellular organization of the nervous system, with its neurons, synapses and ensembles of interconnecting cells, is the same for vertebrates as for invertebrates, as is much of their biochemistry.

LTP is a postsynaptic effect - that is, it occurs in a neuron as a result of incoming stimuli along a pathway which synapses on it - one of the first questions was to identify the neurotransmitter involved in this signaling.

He counted the synapses in the visual cortex and found that, just at the time when I found an increase in protein synthesis, he could detect a small but significant increase in synapse numbers.

What this means is that the selection of just which synapses become stabilized and which are pruned back during the development of the visual system is partly determined by experience.

But how many synapses and cells might be involved for any single memory?

Are such cells and synapses localized to a particular brain region, or are they diffused across many sites within the brain?

Until the last few years, the thought that one might have microscopic techniques sensitive enough to actually see tiny changes in the structure of neurons and their synapses as a result of learning seemed improbable - to start with, one would need to have a very good idea where to look and what to measure in the brain.

However, an alternative approach might argue that, if learning does involve making structural changes at synapses, and the synapses are built of proteins and packed with molecules of neurotransmitter, then learning must itself involve the synthesis of new proteins and transmitters.

But if we reject this view in favour of memory as a property of the brain as a system, rather than of its individual cellular and molecular components, then memory will depend not on distinct biochemistry but on just which cells and synapses are showing the changes, where they are located in the nervous system, and which other cells they make contact with.

Do any specific cells or synapses show changes which correspond to the behavioural adaptation?

He then explains the electrical - that is, physiological - response of the synapses in terms of a cascade of biochemical processes in the presynaptic neuron.

And are changes at these particular sensory-motor synapses the only ones that occur during short- or long-term learning?

Some of these changes are transient, perhaps corresponding to short-term processes, and some, especially in the actual number of synapses, seem more permanent.