Abstract
Habituation, the reduction in an animal's response to the repeated occurrence of an unchanging stimulus, is generally regarded as the simplest form of learning (1). Moreover, it is ubiquitous: every animal with a nervous system seems to possess the capacity for habituation (2). Given these facts, one might expect that habituation would be fairly well understood by modern neurobiologists. In reality, however, our understanding of the cellular mechanisms that underlie habituation is meager at best (3). That habituation remains so poorly grasped, neurobiologically, more than 100 years after the initial scientific accounts of this basic behavioral phenomenon (2) is—or should be—a matter of significant embarrassment for the field of learning and memory. However, two articles in PNAS by Ramaswami and colleagues (4, 5) go some way toward easing the embarrassment. They contain important insights into the cellular and molecular mechanisms of olfactory habituation in Drosophila, insights likely to generalize to other forms of habituation in other species, including mammalian species.
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