European Brain Research Foundation Brain Prize

[Michael Oberdorfer]

The European Brain Research Foundation has awarded the 2016 Brain Prize to three British neuroscientists, Tim Bliss, Graham Collingridge and Richard Morris. The prize is for their independent and collaborative work on synaptic physiology at the molecular level which has provided fundamental insights into the mechanisms underlying memory storage. The Foundation cited the researchers for “outstanding contributions to European neuroscience” as reported by the BBC.

“Morris explained it was the ‘chemistry of memory’ that he and his colleagues had managed to illuminate.”

The concept; “neurons that fire together wire together” has been an idea since it was first articulated by Donald Hebb in the 1940s. The work of these researchers and others has done much to explain the underlying mechanisms.