NEUROBIOLOGY OF LEARNING AND MEMORY, THE

To understand how the brain learns and remembers requires an integration of psychological concepts and behavioral methods with mechanisms of synaptic plasticity systems and systems neuroscience. The Neurobiology of Learning and Memory is a new undergraduate textbook that provides a synthesis of this interdisciplinary field. Each chapter makes the key concepts transparent and accessible to a reader with a minimal background in either neurobiology or psychology and is extensively illustrated with full-color photographs and line art depicting important concepts and experimental data. The first section of the book is organized around the central ideas that synapses are plastic and can be modified by experience and that the synapse is the basic unit of information storage. It introduces students to the long-term potentiation methodology used to study how synapses are modified, the concepts of post-translation processes, genomic signaling processes, local protein synthesis and synaptic tagging, and how they contribute to strengthening synapses.