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by a-priori
5599 days ago
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There's no single mechanism in neuroscience to explain learning in general, because the current understanding is that "learning" is a very vague term that covers many types of adaptation, and each has its own mechanism. I'm not familiar with any network-level mechanisms, but there are many local (synapse- or dendrite-level) ones. The one I'm most familiar with is spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP) [1], which modifies the strength of a synapse based on the millisecond-level timing of action potentials. When cell A tends to fire just before cell B, and the two have synapses connecting them, then cell B will increase the strength of its synapses to A. The reverse is true too: if cell A tends to fire just after cell B, then the synapses will decrease in strength. This is a form of Hebbian learning [2]. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike-timing-dependent_plastici... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory |
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