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Hello, my name is Tim Tully.
I am an academic grandson
of Seymour Benzer.
And my topic today is to talk to you about
drosophila's contribution to the genetics
of learning and memory.
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In fact, the historical roots of
interest in the genetics of learning and
memory can be traced all the way back
to Francis Galton in 1869 when he
wrote a book called Hereditary Genius.
Basically, he looked around with families
that he knew and colleagues that he knew
and observed that people tended to behave
similarly to one another within families.
And this fascinated him, especially from
the point of view of cognitive abilities.
And he began to study it with
the very crude methods that were
available to them at the time.
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In the late 1800s and early 1900s
psychologists began to formalize what
we mean when we think of learning and
memory in laboratory experiments.
Pavlov, who was probably the most
brilliant of these psychologists working
on the problem formally distinguished
two types of learning in the laboratory.
A simpler form was called
non-associative learning,
which could be either
sensitization which was an increase
in a behavioral response due to
exposure to a single stimulus.
Or habituation, which was a decrease in
a behavioral response due to
exposure to a single stimulus.
That would be sort of listening
to a ringing telephone and
after a while you don't hear it anymore
because you've habituated to the sound.
A more complicated form of learning
was called associative learning.
And that basically referred to
change in a behavioral response due
to the temporal association
of two stimuli in time.
There are two basic types, operant
conditioning which means that an animal is
rewarded or reinforced for
doing something in response to a stimulus.
If the animal doesn't do
the right response to a stimulus,
it is not rewarded or punished.
Classical conditioning or
pavlovian conditioning is the temporal
association of two stimuli in
time regardless of what the animal
does in response to the stimuli.
And in fact, pavlovian learning is
what we will talk about going forward.
With this kind of experimental study
on the psychology of learning and
