MOLECULAR MECHANISMS OF ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY AND THEIR CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS

In order to study how the human brain acquires, records, and recalls t he relationships that comprise the images of human memory, our laborat ory initiated a research strategy more than two decades ago. The strat egy began with the hypothesis that the complex patterns of human memor y are constructed from numerous simple relationships that are distribu ted over sensory space in our experience. This hypothesis further prop osed that repeatable fundamental network architectures are distributed over brain structures to create internal images of our external and i nternal sensory experience. Based on this hypothesis, the first elemen t of our research strategy was to (1) identify fundamental network arc hitectures that learn and remember simple associative relationships su ch as those of Pavlovian conditioned responses; (2) demonstrate that t he network biophysical and biochemical mechanisms of associative learn ing and memory in fundamental network architectures are conserved acro ss species as diverse as those of snails, rabbits, and other mammals; (3) demonstrate that conserved memory mechanisms are targets of pathol ogic involvement in a human disease characterized by memory loss such as early Alzheimer's disease; (4) and derive mathematical and logical descriptions of the functions of biological associative network archit ectures during learning and memory. These descriptions would then be u sed to design artificial neural networks that would be implemented wit hin computer programs. Observations demonstrating the plausibility of this research strategy are presented and discussed.