ConceptForgetting

Now let's talk about something that's often forgotten. Forgetting. Suppose you've learned that Fido was a dog but later find out that in actuality Fido is a cat. You need to unlearn the original connection. But here's the problem. In STDP weakening a synapse requires that the neuron fires after the postsynaptic one. But when you hear that Fido was a cat the dog neuron isn't firing at all. There's no way to apply the usual timing rule to weaken the synapse. And even if you could trigger the dog neuron artificially it might fire too later too early because it's far away and we can't synchronize its signal because we can't anticipate it.

• Source: 2025-08-05 ‘Neurons That Fire Together Wire Together’ Is Wrong