This article is a transcription of an electronic symposium in which some ac
tive researchers were invited by the Brazilian Society for Neuroscience and
Behavior (SBNeC) to discuss the last decade's advances in neurobiology of
learning and memory. The way different parts of the brain are recruited dur
ing the storage of different kinds of memory (e.g., short-term vs long-term
memory, declarative vs procedural memory) and even the property of these d
ivisions were discussed. It was pointed out that the brain does not really
store memories, bur stores traces of information that are later used to cre
ate memories, not always expressing a completely veridical picture of the p
ast experienced reality. To perform this process different parts of the bra
in act as important nodes of the neural network that encode, store and retr
ieve the information that will be used to create memories. Some of the brai
n regions are recognizably active during the activation of short-term worki
ng memory (e.g., prefrontal cortex), or the storage of information retrieve
d as long-term explicit memories (e.g., hippocampus and related cortical ar
eas) or the modulation of the storage of memories related to emotional even
ts (e.g., amygdala). This does not mean that there is a separate neural str
ucture completely supporting the storage of each kind of memory but means t
hat these memories critically depend on the functioning of these neural str
uctures. The current view is that there is no sense in talking about hippoc
ampus-based or amygdala-based memory since this implies that there is a one
-to-one correspondence. The present question to be solved is how systems in
teract in memory. The pertinence of attributing a critical role to cellular
processes like synaptic tagging and protein kinase A activation to explain
the memory storage processes at the cellular level was also discussed.