Astrocytes organize associative memory

Abstract

We investigate one aspect of the functional role played by astrocytes in neuron-astrocyte networks present in the mammal brain. To highlight the effect of neuron-astrocyte interaction, we consider simplified networks with bidirectional neuron-astrocyte communication and without any connections between neurons. We show that the fact, that astrocyte covers several neurons and a different time scale of calcium events in astrocyte, alone can lead to the appearance of neural associative memory. Without any doubt, this mechanism makes the neuron networks more flexible to learning, and, hence, may contribute to the explanation, why astrocytes have been evolutionary needed for the development of the mammal brain.