(September 21, 2016 at 10:34 am)Rhythm Wrote:(September 21, 2016 at 1:20 am)fdesilva Wrote: Location of events
Given the above nature of nerve impulses and the transmission of neurotransmitters at synapses the following would be true about their location over time.
Let the Nerve impulses and activity at nerve synapses in the brain at any given time be enclosed in the smallest possible virtual spherical globes( image below).
Then over any length of time these globes will never intersect.
That's an awfully fancy way to say that neurons don't disconnect themselves, walk over to their neighbors, shake hands, and merge.
If so then it's also wrong. Neurons do break and form connections with other neurons.
It actually makes perfect sense. Hebbian learning is taken in its simplest sense to mean that neurons that fire together, wire together. Connections strengthen and weaken over time due to how the pre- and post- synaptic neuron fire. There's very little difference between having a very weak synaptic connection between two neurons and no connection at all. Synaptic drift therefore is a longer term extension to hebbian learning.
I've used this in order to tailor how I learn German for example. I can keep words in short and medium term memory, but I accept that no matter how much I learn, it will take time for it to enter long term memory. This is because my brain needs to grow the connections. So I use a scatter gun approach of trying to expose myself to as many words as possible as early as possible
I personally reckon that this is why we think that children master languages so much more effectively. No one expects them to have a good vocabulary and the same smaller set of words and grammars are presented to them for longer. There are certain things in German that are as natural to me as English because I learnt them much longer ago.
