ABSTRACT
Experience continually changes the brain. Understanding how these changes come about is central to understanding how our brains develop, learn, and remember.
Experience-dependent changes in the brain are manifest in many ways; perhaps the most important is the modification of synaptic transmission. In this chapter we focus on changes in one type of synaptic transmission (glutamatergic) in one type of neural tissue (cortical). Even with these restrictions, we find that there is remarkable diversity in the mechanisms that alter synaptic transmission as a function of experience. Our goal here is not to provide an exhaustive list of the many different types of synaptic plasticity in the cortex, but rather, to present some general principles.
