[Autobiographic memory. Neurobiological substrates]

This work reviews the cellular mechanisms, and the cerebral areas and circuits participating in the consolidation of episodic memory. At the cerebral level the circuit which connects the primary sensory cortices with the polimodal cortices, the entorhinal cortex, dentate gyrus, hippocampus and associative cortices is sequentially activated when the consolidation of a mnesic trace takes place. Cellular phenomena associated with this process is the long-term potentiation (LTP) which requires the activation of NMDA and AMPA receptors, the uptake of calcium and the activation of several enzymes which on one hand catalize the synthesis of retrograde messengers as nitric oxide and on the other induce genomic changes with trophic consequences for both the post and the presynaptic neurons. Eventual relationships between neurobiological findings and mnesic phenomena observed in psychoanalytic practice should be further investigated.