Alcino J. Silva – författare

Science is growing at a pace that exceeds our comprehension. This is no less true of neuroscience than any other discipline. Ambiguity about what is known and what has been disproven confounds researchers and hampers research planning. There are simply too many research articles and too few hours in the day for anyone to read all that is relevant, let alone distinguish the reliable results from the sketchy ones. Engineering the Next Revolution in Neuroscience explores the proposal that we can overcome these obstacles to scientific progress, and revolutionize neuroscience, by using a framework to map the experimental record. With case studies from learning and memory research, the authors show that we can construct networks of experimental research that make the state of our knowledge manifest. Armed with maps of experiments, scientists can determine more efficiently what their fields have accomplished and where the unexplored territories still reside.

Memory can be typically de?ned as the brain function enabling the encoding, storage and retrieval of sensory information. In operational terms, this de?nition implies that our central nervous system not only processes various sensory modalities, be they visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory or gustatory, but is also capable of forming, organizing and conserving memory traces for extended periods of time. At both psychological and physiological levels, there is now a consensus that memory must no longer be seen as a unitary phenomenon but rather as an ensemble of dynamic processes, each one being subserved by different brain regions organized into multiple memory systems that support different forms of memory and that constantly interact to ensure optimal performance during any given cognitive challenge. Despite remarkable progress achieved over the last 30 years in our understanding of the neural bases of cognitive processes and associated pathologies, the questions of how, where and when memory traces are formed in the brain remain central issues and continue to fuel much debate in the ?eld of cognitive neuroscience.