Synaptic Plasticity in the Hippocampus

This is the second time that I have had the honor of opening an interna- tional symposium dedicated to the functions of the hippocampus here in Pecs. It was a pleasure to greet the participants in the hope that their valuable contributions will make this meeting a tradition in this town. As one of the hosts of the symposium, I had the sorrowful duty to remind you of the absence of a dear colleague, Professor Graham God- dard. His tragic and untimely death represents the irreparable loss of both a friend and an excellent researcher. This symposium is dedicated to his memory. If I compare the topics of the lectures of this symposium with those of the previous one, a striking difference becomes apparent. A dominating tendency of the previous symposium was to attempt to define hippocam- pal function or to offer data relevant to supporting or rejecting existing theoretical positions. No such tendency is reflected in the titles of the present symposium, in which most of the contributions deal with hip- pocampal phenomena at the most elementary level. Electrical, biochemi- cal, biophysical, and pharmacological events at the synaptic, membrane, or intracellular level are analyzed without raising the question of what kind of integral functions these elementary phenomena are a part of.