Interactions among Neurotransmitters: Their Importance to the “Integrated Organism”

Abstract

Knowledge develops by quantal steps that depend upon the invention of new concepts and new techniques. Our area of the biobehavioral sciences is now in a period of rapid development, which provides exciting challenges for all who care to give it thought. It was almost a half-century ago when I participated in a symposium on “Physiological Mechanisms in Animal Behavior” organized by the Society for Experimental Biology and held at Cambridge University in England. The most dramatic moment of the meeting was provided by Karl Lashley in his presentation entitled, “In Search of the Engram.” In ending a summary of 30 years of his research using surgical ablation techniques, he commented, “I sometimes feel, in reviewing the evidence on the localization of the memory trace, that the necessary conclusion is that learning just is not possible” (Lashley, 1950). Riding back to London on the train I asked him: “What next?” He expounded at some length on the necessity of seeking the nature of dynamic events occurring within neuronal sites and of looking for interactions between them and the behavior of the “integrated organism.” Some 15 years later two professors—this time eminent biochemists—anticipated an agenda, an approach to uncovering the nature of that integration.