Hi,
An interesting and unexplored area is the discovery that dendrites can learn (in addition to synaptic learning). This new discovery showed that dendrites can respond to inputs (both synaptic inputs as well as back-propagated AP’s), and they can tune how responsive they are. Most interestingly, they found that dendrites can change their response properties in a matter of seconds, unlike synapses which can take minutes to hours to learn.
This offers a whole new dimension for learning and for storing information!
It could be possible to “unlearn” the information stored on a dendrite without removing any synapses, and then at a later time to “relearn” that information by simply re-enabling that dendrite. Or maybe a dendrite could become super sensitive to synaptic inputs, which would effectively lower threshold for detecting that input.
This mechanism might also alter how action potential back-propagate from the soma to the dendrites, which would allow this mechanism to influence the hebbian learning.