Neural Plasticity
Konorski married the neurophysiologist Liliana Lubinska, who obtained her doctorate with Louis Lapicque. Konorski, Lubinska, and Miller established a laboratory at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology. With Konorski's knowledge of neurophysiology greatly expanded through his collaboration with Lubinska, he turned his attention to the neural mechanisms that underlie conditioning.
Konorski asked how pre-existing connections between neurons in the brain could be changed by conditioning. He suggested an idea similar to Hebb in which coincidental activation in time causes the potential connections to be transformed into actual excitatory connections. Inhibitory connections arise when the excitation of one input coincides in time with a decease in its associated connection. He described the process: "The plastic changes would be related to the formation ad multiplication of new synaptic junctions between the axon terminals of one nerve cell and the soma (i.e. the body and the dendrites) of the other" This idea that synapses strengthen with use was also proposed in the West in the theory of Hebbian synapses by Donald Hebb.
Read more about this topic: Jerzy Konorski