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Long-Term Potentiation: One Kind or Many?

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Eppur si muove: Doing History and Philosophy of Science with Peter Machamer

Part of the book series: The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science ((WONS,volume 81))

Abstract

Do neurobiologists aim to discover natural kinds? I address this question in this chapter via a critical analysis of classification practices operative across the 43-year history of research on long-term potentiation (LTP). I suggest that this 43-year history supports the idea that the structure of scientific practice surrounding LTP research has remained an obstacle to the discovery of natural kinds as philosophers of science have traditionally conceived them.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I am using this condition that Craver puts forward in his 2002 paper as a heuristic because I think it gets something right about how some neuroscientists conceive of double dissociation experiments and what can be accomplished by using them.

  2. 2.

    Little work had been done to study cortical synaptic plasticity in the mammalian brain due in part to technological limitations (Kandel and Spencer 1968, 85–86). However, quite a bit of work had been undertaken to induce changes in synaptic efficacy in the invertebrate, Aplysia depilans (Kandel and Spencer 1968). Early work on Aplysia indicated that activity-dependent changes in synaptic strength primarily involved pre-synaptic (e.g., changes in neurotransmitter release) as opposed to post-synaptic mechanisms (Kandel and Spencer 1968; See also Sweatt 2016).

  3. 3.

    The general claim that persisted in the literature until 1986 was that “long-term potentiation [. . .] seen in several hippocampal pathways following repetitive stimulation, [was] somewhat unique when compared to the post-tetanic potentiation seen at the neuromuscular junction or in invertebrates” (Dunwiddie and Lynch 1978, 353–354) in so far that it was longer lasting.

  4. 4.

    They still lack answers, as I explain later in this section.

  5. 5.

    Bliss and Gardner-Medwin, for example, acknowledged, “the mechanisms of the effect remain uncertain” (Bliss and Gardner-Medwin 1973, 373). Douglas and Goddard were careful to indicate, “this type of potentiation may underlie memory storage in one part of the mammalian brain”5 (1975, 214) rather than at all mammalian cortical synapses. While some investigators regarded “intracellular recordings from in vitro preparations of both immature and mature hippocampal tissue” as “similar to those obtained in vivo” (Deadwyler et al. 1975, 80), one early failure to obtain LTP in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus was attributed to the possibility that in vitro slice preparations could compromise the integrity of the synaptic pathways (Deadwyler et al., 1975, 84) and result in a “decreased amount of recurring excitation” compared to in vivo preparations (Alger and Teyler 1976, 478). By 1978, Dunwiddie and Lynch determined that “various conditioning frequencies apparently induce[d] different degrees of long-term potentiation” (Dunwiddie and Lynch 1978, 366) and that synaptic transmission was required for the initiation of LTP (Dunwiddie, Madison & Lynch 413).

  6. 6.

    Ursula Staubli, for example, claimed “mossy fiber potentiation is unlike LTP both in induction and expression mechanisms and thus is a wholly different form of synaptic plasticity” (Staubli 1992, 151).

  7. 7.

    At the time of Bliss and Lomo’s discovery, LTP had been reliably produced in invertebrates across many different laboratories. Bliss and Lomo’s finding was different, because it was produced in the mammalian brain. Debates about whether the cellular and mechanisms for LTP induction were conserved across species persisted well into the 21st century (See for example Bickle 2006). It was common to hear some investigators arguing that LTP involved pre-synaptic mechanisms and others that it involved post- synaptic mechanisms. Support for conservation of mechanisms waxed and waned depending on the grain of analysis one used to assess similarities and differences in mechanisms across organisms (See Bechtel and Mundale 1999, Sullivan 2009; Craver 2009).

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Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Uljana Feest for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper and Floh Thiels and Peter Machamer for many interesting and helpful discussions about LTP.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Rotman Institute of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

    Jacqueline A. Sullivan

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  1. Jacqueline A. Sullivan
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Correspondence to Jacqueline A. Sullivan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University at Albany SUNY, Albany, New York, USA

    Marcus P. Adams

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

    Zvi Biener

  3. Institute of Philosophy, Leibniz University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Uljana Feest

  4. Department of Philosophy, Rotman Institute of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada

    Jacqueline A. Sullivan

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Sullivan, J.A. (2017). Long-Term Potentiation: One Kind or Many?. In: Adams, M., Biener, Z., Feest, U., Sullivan, J. (eds) Eppur si muove: Doing History and Philosophy of Science with Peter Machamer. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 81. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52768-0_9

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