Learning Mutants

Abstract

Genetic strategies to elucidate the substrates for memory induction, maintenance, and retrieval have evolved rapidly during the previous decade. Here we review the wealth of information that has been derived from work with “transgenic” mammals, and attempt to establish a framework from which we might better appreciate the genetic and molecular constituents of “normal” learning and memory, as well as of common dementias (e.g., Alzheimer's disease) that impinge on these processes. From this body of work, we are poised to construct comprehensive descriptions of the mechanisms that subserve memory storage in the brain, and moreover, to envisage practical strategies to overcome certain learning deficits and to modulate learning in otherwise normal individuals.

Maurizio Meloni’s Political Biology

“…From this image has flowed ideas of a ‘collective unconscious’ that might be recovered by, say, Jungian psychoanalysis, as well as of a ‘genetic code’ which might provide a partial record of the lived past and constrain the prospects of the living. In the late 19th century, these ideas reached their peak, as promoted by the physiologist Ewald Hering and the psychologist Theodule Ribot (Matzel, 2002). To be sure, they were being promoted just before Mendel’s approach to genetics became widely known and interpreted to support the Weismann Barrier.…”