Basic Neuroscience: Long-Term Potentiation

If you've taken a psychology or neuroscience class in college, you are probably familiar with the process of Long-Term Potentiation.

If this is unfamiliar, LTP describes the physiological process where neurons create and reinforce synapses when you are introduced to a new idea or concept.  The more you rehearse the idea or concept, the stronger the synaptic connections and the more crystallized the memory becomes.

I had a brief discussion about this in class today.  A student had asked me, "How do people remember things that are seemingly useless pieces of information (like the content we're learning, no offense) and remember them well enough to pass a test later on?"

The brain works in seemingly mysterious ways, but under the right environmental circumstances, a human being will typically make the same pattern of choices consistently.  For many of the students in this community, they have such difficult lives that it complicates their priorities when it comes to learning.

It is more important to support the family than to go to school.  It is more important to earn money now to pay bills than to wait for a higher paying job later on.  It is not worth the 4-years of taking on loans and the increasing debt to go to college when you can make money now.

I hear these arguments with regularity and under their life circumstances, I would probably agree.  In order to learn 5 different and robust content areas well in high school, you have to devote a significant amount of time at home or after-school to studying in order for LTP to work.  An inability to invest the time and energy at home towards this process means that the material will be stored in short-term memory and subsequently forgotten.

It's easy for students to assume that they are natural learners.  They may get the concept immediately after you teach it, but quiz them later and it's as if they've never seen the material before.  It is all because effective LTP is dependent on repetition through elaborative rehearsal.