The brain and its functions still pose many open questions. One of them is how exactly we form long-term memories about the environment. In a new study Ryuichi Shigemoto and his group from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) together with researchers from Aarhus University and the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Japan discovered a new signaling pathway in the hippocampus area of the brain that regulates how information about new environments is transferred into long-term memory.