PSYC10003 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Retrograde Amnesia, Anterograde Amnesia, Temporal Lobe
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Radical behaviourism = no thoughts, ideas or emotions: stimulus -> conditioned response, no thought whatsoever associated with the brain. So for eg. for a set of 3 presynaptic neurons: each time the postsynaptic neuron fires, the middle presynaptic neuron always fires as well, so the firing of the middle presynaptic neuron is associated with the postsynaptic neuron. Hebb"s original idea: cell assembly = set of neurons that have learned to fire as a unit because of hebb"s learning rule. This assembly can recreate the firing pattern caused by a stimulus even when the stimulus is not present. If cells repeatedly fire together, connection is made stronger. Cell assembles may be very large and redundant so the memory production occurs all over the brain, just like lashley proposed, but are still localised within the cell assemblies. The cell assemblies may be largely spread out and complex, redundant.