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Synaptic Plasticity PP

Submitted by zalam on Fri, 09/20/2019 - 00:52

Synaptic plasticity is a concept that had always seemed interesting to me. Even after birth, your brain is capable of changing its connections and wiring. It best described by Donald Hebb's words on long-term potentiation: "Neurons that wire together, fire together". The concept of long-term potentiation involves three stages: input, induction and expression. During the input period, the presynaptic neuron fires a single action potential. This causes a small post-synaptic potential. During induction, multiple action potentials are fired repeatedly along the presynaptic neuron, leaving very little time for the postsynaptic neuron to fire a small action potential and then die down. As a result, the postsynaptic potentials keep bulidng up and reach a threshhold where the neuron is depolarized, leading to an action potential to be fired. This event of accumulation of potentials over a brief period of time is called temporal summation. Finally in the last stage, we see that a single action potential, like the one in the first stage, is able to cause a full action potential called the excitatory postsynaptic potential. This is essentially how we learn. If we keep introducing the same stimulus over and over again, the wiring in our brain adjusts to fire a strong action potential. However, our brain does have a capacity for how much we can learn. The neurons can get too saturated with new wirings if there is no way to reverse this process. Thus, certain wirings start getting weaker by time and this is called long term depression. This would be another way of saying that we are slowly forgetting what we had learned. 

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this is a really interesting topic to write about 

this is a very interesting topic and a good paragraph! At the begining of the third sentence you should add "is" to say "It is best..." 

The word this is used in the paragraph a lot and it becomes repetive.  One way to remove a "this"  using "Thus, certain wirings start getting weaker by time and this is called long term depression" and saying "Thus, certain wirings start getting weaker, known as long term depression"