![]() A narrow focus on the synapse has given us a mere stick-figure conception of how learning and the memories it engenders work. What we retain depends on our emotional response to an experience, how novel it is, where and when the event occurred and our level of attention and motivation during the event, and we process these thoughts and feelings while asleep. ![]() Even when synapses do fire together, they sometimes do not wire together. But not everything we remember results from reward or punishment, and in fact, most experiences are forgotten. The theory proved sound, and the molecular details of how synapses change during learning have been described in depth. This idea gave rise to an oft-quoted axiom: “Synapses that fire together wire together.” In the dogs’ case, it would mean the brain now knows that the sound of a bell is followed immediately by the presence of food. When this happens, learning has taken place. Hebb proposed that when two neurons fire together, sending off impulses simultaneously, the connections between them-the synapses-grow stronger. In 1949 psychologist Donald Hebb adapted Pavlov’s “associative learning rule” to explain how brain cells might acquire knowledge. ![]() Our concepts of how the two and a half pounds of flabby flesh between our ears accomplish learning date to Ivan Pavlov’s classic experiments, where he found that dogs could learn to salivate at the sound of a bell.
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