Neurobiologiczne podstawy powstawania śladów pamięciowych

Over fifty years of research have provided valuable insights into the nature of engrams, including the brain structures involved in their formation and the cellular mechanisms underlying this process. The molecular and cellular mechanisms of memory encoding, storage, and retrieval are still debated despite significant progress in research on memory. One theory suggests that the formation of an engram relies on a group of active neurons during the learning process. Those neurons undergo biochemical and physical changes to stably store information which can be reactivated during memory recall. Along with that theory, the present review provides the essential conclusions from the current state of knowledge concerning formation of a lasting memory trace, at both the structural level (by outlining the involvement of the diencephalon, amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampal formation in memory processing) and at the cellular level (by characterizing the processes of memory consolidation, reconsolidation, and extinction).