Glial Biology of Learning and Cognition, to be held in Arlington, Virginia, February, 2013

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Understanding how learning and memory take place in the brain is one of the major questions in neuroscience, with important benefits to health and disease, and practical applications in devising better ways of teaching that are science-based. Despite decades of research this remains one of the most challenging questions in brain science. Until recently, all research on learning and memory at the cellular level was focused on neurons, even though the majority of cells in the brain are not neurons. These non-neuronal cells, glia, do not generate electrical impulses, but new research reveals that glia can communicate chemically and that they can sense and control communication between neurons in several different ways. Glia are therefore likely to participate in learning and memory and to provide unique capabilities to information processing that may resolve some long-standing questions about cognition and learning that have been elusive. The workshop would synthesize the latest information on glia in learning and cognition and bring together researchers from traditionally separate disciplines from across a broad scope that includes cellular, systems-level, behavioral, and computational neuroscience, to begin to understand how glia may participate in learning. The two-and-a-half-day workshop would seek to outline future directions for research on glia in learning, with an emphasis on identifying how glia may contribute a new direction for research to solve long-standing problems in the field of learning. The objectives of this workshop are at the cutting edge of several scientific disciplines, including cellular neuroscience and the rapidly expanding research on neuron-glia interactions, human brain imaging during learning, and forging new directions in neuronal modeling. Broader impacts include: The inclusion of women scientists and scientists from many nationalities will provide the opportunity for significant cross-fertilization of ideas between fields and pioneer new directions of research to explore novel solutions to aspects of learning that have been difficult to solve from an exclusively neuronal perspective. The plans for dissemination will make these new findings and new ideas available to a wide scientific audience through a review article published in a major scientific journal, a special issue of a journal and a book.