colleagues and I examined slices of the hippocampus taken from genetically modified mice and found that in each of the three major pathways of the hippocampus, long-term potentiation has two phases similar to those of long-term facilitation in Aplysia. A single train of electrical stimuli produces a transient, early phase of long-term potentiation that lasts only one to three hours and does not require the synthesis of new protein. The reaction of neurons to those stimuli was just as Roger Nicoll had described: NMDA receptors in the postsynaptic cell are activated, leading to the flow of
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