This is all true (as far as we know), but it's tricky to suss how exactly how this works in a living brain. It's relatively easy to induce spike-timing depende

This is all true (as far as we know), but it's tricky to suss how exactly how this works in a living brain. It's relatively easy to induce spike-timing dependent plasticity in vitro, where the background activity is low and the experimenter has almost total control over the pre/post-synaptic neurons' activity. However, in vivo neurons are often bombarded with input from thousands of synaptic partners, breaking the clear correspondence that underlies a lot of LTP/LTD rules. People have gotten them to work, after a fashion, in vivo: Yang Dan's group shifted the orientation of V1 neurons and Dan Shultz's group has some cool backwards conditioning stuff in rat barrel cortex. However, the effects are small and often require a heroic, unphysiological amount of effort, so....there must be more to it than that.