How to teach this paper

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This column by Ashley Juavinett guides educators and self-learners through recent seminal neuroscience papers.

Photograph of two hands drawing overlapping red and blue waveforms on a chalkboard.

How to teach this paper: ‘Coordination of entorhinal-hippocampal ensemble activity during associative learning,’ by Igarashi et al. (2014)

Kei Igarashi and his colleagues established an important foundation in memory research: the premise that brain regions oscillate together to form synaptic connections and, ultimately, memories.

By Ashley Juavinett
4 November 2024 | 8 min read
Illustration of a canyon landscape with an orange clock face in place of a sun.

How to teach this paper: ‘Behavioral time scale synaptic plasticity underlies CA1 place fields,’ by Bittner and Milstein et al. (2017)

Katie Bittner, Aaron Milstein and their colleagues found that cellular learning can happen over longer timescales than Hebb’s rule predicts. How long should we wait to teach students about this phenomenon?

By Ashley Juavinett
24 June 2024 | 11 min read
An illustration of mice observing a lesson on a tiny chalkboard

How to teach this paper: ‘Creating a false memory in the hippocampus,’ by Ramirez and Liu et al. (2013)

We’ve known how to implant memories in mouse minds for a decade. Can we implant these ideas in our students?

By Ashley Juavinett
6 February 2024 | 10 min read
A hand points to an illustration on a chalkboard.

How to teach this paper: ‘Neural population dynamics during reaching,’ by Churchland & Cunningham et al. (2012)

This foundational paper, with more than 1,500 citations, is an important departure from early neuroscience research. Don’t be afraid of the math in the first paragraph.

By Ashley Juavinett
13 November 2023 | 9 min read

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By Anne E. West
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Hessameddin Akhlaghpour outlines how RNA may implement universal computation

Could the brain’s computational abilities extend beyond neural networks to molecular mechanisms? Akhlaghpour describes how natural universal computation may have evolved via RNA mechanisms.

By Paul Middlebrooks
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