I’m currently attending the Winter Conference on Neural Plasticity in lovely St. Kitts & Nevis and I’ll be tweeting when I can from #wcnp12 when the Internet access in the room decides to cooperate.
Today’s opening session at the meeting was a historical perspective on selected topics in neural plasticity. I thought I’d share an interesting piece of history about one topic that has exploded in terms of research output over the last 20 years: conditioned fear. Michael Fanselow gave the lecture on the history of fear research and focused on the era prior to the exponential growth of the literature, sticking to 1920-1980. Here’s a graph from a very recent review simply noting the number of “fear extinction” papers in the literature (one small sub-field in this topic,) just to give you a sense of how rapidly this field has grown:
Found on Google Images, not sure why it's in front of the paywall!!
I’ll do may best to channel Dr. Fanselow with the next few paragraphs: