Why Do We Forget? Using Sea Slugs to Understand Memory and Memory Loss
Dr. Irina Calin-Jageman and Dr. Robert Calin-Jageman share the results of their research with Aplysia californica (i.e., sea slugs) to help determine why neural connections are lost and, in some cases, regained.
Aplysia californica–a type of ‘sea slug’ that has become a favorite organism for studying learning and memory. Why? Aplysia have both short- and long-term memory for basic types of associative and non-associative learning (they can learn simple things and can remember what they learn for a reasonably long time). We can figure out how these animals learn because they have only 20,000 neurons in their entire CNS (compare this to the 1 million or so in a honey bee or the 60-80 billion in your head). Moreover, Aplysia have some of the largest neurons in the animal kingdom, with some neuron diameters reach up to 1mm! This makes it easier to record the electrical activity in Aplysia neurons and to harvest them for molecular and cellular analysis.
You can read more about the Calin-Jageman's research on their blog page The Slug Lab.
This event was part of the At Home With Dominican series presented via Zoom to university alumni on October 6, 2020.
