The first rigorous test of memory consolidation came in 1949, when the American psychologist C. P. Duncan applied electrical stimuli to the brain of animals during or immediately after training, resulting in convulsions that disrupted memory and caused retrograde amnesia. Producing seizures several hours after training had little or no effect on recall. Almost twenty years later, Louis Flexner at the University of Pennsylvania made the remarkable discovery that drugs that inhibit the synthesis of proteins in the brain disrupt long-term memory if given during and shortly after learning, but
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