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

了解学习和记忆如何在大脑中发生是神经科学的主要问题之一，对健康和疾病有重要的好处，并在设计更好的基于科学的教学方法方面有实际应用。尽管经过几十年的研究，这仍然是脑科学中最具挑战性的问题之一。直到最近，所有关于细胞水平上的学习和记忆的研究都集中在神经元上，尽管大脑中的大多数细胞不是神经元。这些非神经元细胞，神经胶质细胞，不产生电脉冲，但新的研究表明，神经胶质细胞可以进行化学交流，它们可以以几种不同的方式感知和控制神经元之间的交流。因此，胶质细胞可能参与学习和记忆，并提供独特的信息处理能力，可能解决一些长期存在的问题，认知和学习一直难以捉摸。该研讨会将综合神经胶质在学习和认知方面的最新信息，并将来自传统上独立学科的研究人员聚集在一起，涵盖细胞，系统水平，行为和计算神经科学等广泛领域，开始了解神经胶质如何参与学习。为期两天半的研讨会旨在概述未来胶质细胞在学习中的研究方向，重点是确定胶质细胞如何为解决学习领域长期存在的问题提供新的研究方向。本次研讨会的目标是在几个科学学科的前沿，包括细胞神经科学和迅速扩大的研究神经胶质细胞的相互作用，人脑成像在学习过程中，并在神经元建模锻造新的方向。更广泛的影响包括：女科学家和来自许多国家的科学家的参与将为各领域之间的思想交流提供机会，并开拓新的研究方向，以探索从纯神经元角度难以解决的学习问题的新解决方案。传播计划将通过在一份主要科学期刊上发表评论文章、一份期刊特刊和一本书，向广大科学受众提供这些新的研究结果和新的想法。

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.