![]() ![]() The scientists ask: Can we intervene in a depressed state by reactivating positive memories? “You are what you have done what you have done is in your memory what you remember defines who you are.” If memories can be manipulated at will, what does it mean to have a past? If we can erase a bad memory, or create a good one, how do we develop a true sense of self? “Memory is identity,” the British author Julian Barnes writes in his memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of. Though the work so far has been done on lab mice, the duo’s discoveries open a deeper line of thought into human nature. “The sky is really the limit now,” says Josselyn. Their work has launched a new era in memory research and could someday lead to new treatments for medical and psychiatric afflictions such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and Alzheimer’s disease. No one ever thought that you could actually, really do this.”Įxcept Ramirez and Liu. “A lot of people had been thinking along these lines,” says Sheena Josselyn, a senior neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, who studies the cellular underpinnings of memory, “but they never dreamed that these experiments would actually work. The prospect of tinkering precisely with memory has tantalized scientists for years. “It’s a real breakthrough that shows the power of these techniques to address fundamental questions about how the brain works.” “It’s a fantastic feat,” says Howard Eichenbaum, a leading memory researcher and director of the Center for Neuroscience at Boston University, where Ramirez did his undergraduate work. The observation culminated more than two years of a long-shot research effort and supported an extraordinary hypothesis: Not only was it possible to identify brain cells involved in the encoding of a single memory, but those specific cells could be manipulated to create a whole new “memory” of an event that never happened. “Merry Freaking Christmas,” read the subject line of the email Ramirez shot off to Liu, who was spending the 2012 holiday in Yosemite National Park. Rather, it was reacting to a false memory that Ramirez and his MIT colleague Xu Liu had planted in its brain. Which was amazing, because the memory was bogus: The mouse had never received an electric shock in that box. Its memory of the trauma must have been quite vivid. It was a textbook fear response, and if anything, the mouse’s posture was more rigid than Ramirez had expected. Instead of curiously sniffing around, though, the animal instantly froze in terror, recalling the experience of receiving a foot shock in that same box. Steve Ramirez, a 24-year-old doctoral student at the time, placed the mouse in a small metal box with a black plastic floor. ![]() But creatures were definitely stirring, including a mouse that would soon be world famous. It was the day before Christmas, and the normally busy MIT laboratory on Vassar Street in Cambridge was quiet. ![]()
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