The brain decade in debate: I. Neurobiology of learning and memory

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.