11. Introduction to Neuroscience II

Stanford University.

I would like to get started, please.

So my name is Patrick House.

I am a neuroscience PhD student.

I work with Robert in Robert's lab.

I'm a first year.

And I study something that you guys will eventually

hear about, but I don't want to ruin the punchline.

But today we're going to talk about memory and plasticity.

And so two days ago on Wednesday,

you guys all sat in here, in this room.

And you learned, some of you for the first time,

some of you for maybe the 10th time, the basics

of neurobiology, of how a neuron works,

how a neuron-- you have a presynaptic cell,

you have a postsynaptic cell, and this kind

of simplified version of the communication and information

transfer.

And something interesting happened

between now and then, which is that now you

sit in the same room.

And something about you knows something about neuroscience

now.

You heard one of the TAs talk.

You slept on it.

And then you come back now and you

have assimilated, integrated into your identity,

into what you know, new facts.

And this lecture is about how you do that.

And to kind of get at what memory is,

we need to think about a lot of different ways

in which it's interesting, and a lot of different spectrums

and severities about memory.

So why is it that some memories last our entire lives,

whereas other memories, we hear and they're fleeting?

They go away in a second.

Why is it that someone sitting next to you in bed,

telling you a story, and as you go

to sleep you can't remember it?