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Focused Review ARTICLE

Hebbian reverberations in emotional memory micro circuits

Luke R. Johnson^1*, Joseph E. LeDoux² and Valérie Doyère^3*

Department of Psychiatry and Program in Neuroscience, USU, Bethesda, MD, USA

Center for Neural Science, NYU, New York, NY, USA

NAMC, CNRS-UMR8620, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France

The study of memory in most behavioral paradigms, including emotional memory paradigms, has focused on the feed forward components that underlie Hebb's first postulate, associative synaptic plasticity. Hebb's second postulate argues that activated ensembles of neurons reverberate in order to provide temporal coordination of different neural signals, and thereby facilitate coincidence detection. Recent evidence from our groups has suggested that the lateral amygdala (LA) contains recurrent microcircuits and that these may reverberate. Additionally this reverberant activity is precisely timed with latencies that would facilitate coincidence detection between cortical and sub cortical afferents to the LA. Thus, recent data at the microcircuit level in the amygdala provide some physiological evidence in support of the second Hebbian postulate.

Keywords:

amygdala, fear, ensembles, network, recurrent

Citation:

Johnson LR, LeDoux J and Doyere V (2009). Hebbian Reverberations in Emotional Memory Micro Circuits.Front. Neurosci. 3,2:198- 205. doi: 10.3389/neuro.01.027.2009

Received:

09 May 2009;

Paper pending published:

26 June 2009;

Accepted:

09 July 2009;

Published online:

15 September 2009.

Edited by:

Gilles Laurent, California Institute of Technology, USA

Reviewed by:

Shreesh P. Mysore, Stanford University, USA

© 2009 Johnson, LeDoux and Doyère. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Luke R Johnson PhD Department of Psychiatry and Program in Neuroscience Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, MD, 20814. email: Luke.Johnson@usuhs.mil