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All functions of the brain represent an interaction between genetic and developmental processes on the one hand and environmental factors such as learning on the other. |
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Some of the most characteristic aspects of behavior result from the ability to learn from experience. We are what we are largely because of what we have learned and remember about our world. Learning also has broad cultural ramifications and extends beyond the individual to the transmission of culture from generation to generation. Learning is a major vehicle for behavioral adaptation and for social progress. Moreover, since the performance of most behaviors involve some aspect of learning and memory, experience contributes at least partly to many psychological disorders. Thus, insofar as psychotherapeutic intervention is successful in treating neurotic mental illnesses, it presumably works because treatment creates an educational experience that allows people to change. |
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Some of the most challenging problems in neural science lie at the interface between the study of mental processes and biology. In recent years cognitive psychology and neurobiology have matured independently and, in the process, have moved closer together. As a result, we are now beginning to benefit from the increase in explanatory power that often occurs when two disparate disciplines begin to converge on a common ground. The rewards of this merger are evident particularly in the study of memory and learning. Animal studies are yielding insights into mental processes from the behavioral to the molecular levels and are providing the foundation for a science of mentation that promises ultimately to revolutionize our understanding of behavior and its abnormalities. |
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Much progress in the cellular study of learning and memory has recently been made by examining elementary forms of learning: habituation, sensitization, and classical conditioning. These elementary behavioral modifications have been analyzed both in simple vertebrate preparations, such as the isolated spinal cord or brain slice and in the nervous systems of invertebrates. |
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Please follow the links to your right to further examine the role of learning and memory in the generation of behaviour, but now focusing on the mechanisms whereby learning alters the structure and function of nerve cells and their interconnections. |
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(1) Habituation |
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(2) Sensitization |
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(3) Classical Conditioning |
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(4) Somatotopic Map Plasticity |
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(5) Implications |
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(6) Credits |
