Stably maintained dendritic spines are associated with lifelong memories

By Guang Yang, F. Pan, Wen-Biao Gan. 2009

1,170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Changes in synaptic connections are considered essential for learning and memory formation. However, it is unknown how neural circuits undergo continuous synaptic changes during learning while maintaining lifelong memories. Here we show, by following postsynaptic dendritic spines over time in the mouse cortex, that learning and novel sensory experience lead to spine formation and elimination by a protracted process. The extent of spine remodelling correlates with behavioural improvement after learning, suggesting a crucial role of synaptic structural plasticity in memory formation. Importantly, a small fraction of new spines induced by novel experience, together with most spines formed early during development and surviving experience-dependent elimination, are preserved and provide a structural basis for memory retention throughout the entire life of an animal. These studies indicate that learning and daily sensory experience leave minute but permanent marks on cortical connections and suggest that lifelong memories are stored in largely stably connected synaptic networks.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Neurology, Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks (2016, background): “Recent evidence suggests that the mammalian brain may avoid catastrophic forgetting by protecting previously-acquired knowledge in neocortical circuits [Cichon and Gan, 2015, Hayashi-Takagi et al., 2015, Yang et al., 2009, 2014].”
A Comprehensive Survey of Continual Learning: Theory, Method and Application (2023, background): “Biological neural networks are capable of flexibly modulating synaptic plasticity in response to dynamic inputs, including (1) stabilization of previously-learned synaptic changes to overcome subsequent interference [154], [471], [495], which motivates the strategies of weight regularization to sele”
NISPA: Neuro-Inspired Stability-Plasticity Adaptation for Continual Learning in Sparse Networks (2022, background): “This suggests that stable spines serve as substrates for long-term information storage (Zuo et al., 2005; Yang et al., 2009; 2014; Grutzendler et al., 2002).”
Natural continual learning: success is a journey, not (just) a destination (2021, methodology): “This approach can be motivated by findings in the neuroscience literature of increased stability for a subset of synapses after learning [48, 49].”
Alleviating catastrophic forgetting using context-dependent gating and synaptic stabilization (2018, methodology): “Particularly, skill acquisition and retention is associated with the creation and stabilization of dendritic spines (6, 7).”
Continual Learning via Bit-Level Information Preserving (2021, background): “Previous neurobiology evidences suggest that human brain may mitigate forgetting by synaptic consolidation[34, 33], which is the process of strengthening synapses that are crucial for certain knowledge or skills.”
A theory for how sensorimotor skills are learned and retained in noisy and nonstationary neural circuits (2013, background): “Why should dendritic spines come in and out of existence even when there is no overt learning? Will perpetual synaptic flux destabilize a learning system and erase old memories? A pair of recent two-photon microscopy studies looked at the addition and subtraction of dendritic spines in the primary m”
Structural plasticity of GABAergic axons is regulated by network activity and GABAA receptor activation (2013, background): “For excitatory synapses these changes often occur on the level of dendritic spines, and these have been studied extensively (Engert and Bonhoeffer, 1999; Trachtenberg et al., 2002; Holtmaat et al., 2005; Keck et al., 2008; Hofer et al., 2009; Yang et al., 2009).”
Spine Plasticity in the Motor Cortex (2010, background): “In the barrel cortex, while enriched environment and learning paradigms promote spine formation [37 ,39], experience is also essential for the profound synapse pruning during adolescent development [33].”
Memory Engram Cells Have Come of Age. (2015, positive): “In another study (Yang et al., 2009), training on an accelerated rotarod (but not on a slowly rotating rotarod) over two days led to an increase in spine formation in the primary motor cortex.”
Neuroplasticity subserving motor skill learning (2011, positive): “…of the mouse motor cortex following motor training (Xu et al., 2009), and the extent of spine remodeling has been shown to correlate with behavioral improvements after learning, suggesting that this mechanism of synaptic plasticity may contribute to motor memory formation (Yang et al., 2009).”
Microglia promote learning-dependent synapse formation through BDNF (2013, methodology): “This procedure has been described in detail previously (Yang et al., 2009a).”