long-term potentiation: a standalone construct

Timothy Bliss and Terje Lømo first reported long-term potentiation in 1973, showing that a brief burst of high-frequency electrical stimulation to a pathway in the rabbit hippocampus, a brain region central to memory, produced a strengthening of synaptic transmission that lasted for hours. The term names this persistent increase in the efficiency of communication across a synapse, the junction between two nerve cells, measured as a larger response in the receiving neuron to the same input after the conditioning stimulation. In their 1993 synthesis, Bliss and Graham Collingridge set out LTP as the leading cellular model of how the brain stores information, linking it to the long-standing idea that memory is written into the strength of connections between neurons. What makes LTP a landmark is that it gives learning and memory a concrete, testable physical mechanism at the level of the single synapse: an experimentally induced, input-specific, and long-lasting change in synaptic strength that can be recorded, quantified, and manipulated. Its best-studied form, at connections in the hippocampus, depends on a receptor for the neurotransmitter glutamate called the NMDA receptor, which opens only when the sending and receiving cells are active together, so the synapse acts as a detector of coincident activity.[1][2][3]

Unit

A lasting, input-specific increase in synaptic strength, recorded as a larger postsynaptic response to a fixed stimulus

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Induced by high-frequency or theta-burst stimulation and quantified in field or whole-cell recordings as the percentage rise in the postsynaptic response (excitatory postsynaptic potential slope or population spike amplitude) relative to a pre-stimulation baseline