Shedding new light on the formation of emotional fear memories
Monday, December 8, 2014 - 18:00
in Psychology & Sociology
Everyday events are easy to forget, but unpleasant ones can remain engraved in the brain. A new study identifies a neural mechanism through which unpleasant experiences are translated into signals that trigger fear memories by changing neural connections in a part of the brain called the amygdala. The findings show that a long-standing theory on how the brain forms memories, called Hebbian plasticity, is partially correct, but not as simple as was originally proposed.