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A switch to turn on and off the memories of rats has been discovered
Scientists have developed a way to turn memories on and off in mice.
According to the scientists, they used an electronic system that mimics neural signals in order to switch the memories on and off. What they did was to duplicate the mechanism of the brain which is linked to long-term learned behavior in the rats, even in the period of time in which the rates were drugged in order to forget. “Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget,” said Theodore Berger, Ph.D., of the University of Southern California. Especially for the study, the rats learned a task in which they had to press one lever instead for another in order to get a reward. Using embedded electrical probes, the team of researchers, led by Sam A. Deadwyler, Ph.D., of the Wake Forest Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, analyzed the brain activity of the rats between two areas of the part of the brain named hippocampus, called CA3 and CA1. “No hippocampus,” said Berger, “no long-term memory, but still short-term memory.” The scientists then blocked the neural interactions between the two areas, by using some pharmacological agents and the rats seemed to have forgotten the behavior they had previously learned. According to Berger, the rats still knew what lever to press for water, but they only knew it for about 5 to 10 seconds, they could not remember which lever they pressed afterwards.
What the researchers did next was to create an artificial hippocampal system which was able to duplicate the activity between the two areas mentioned earlier, CA3 and CA1. It seems that once the memory-encoding function was activated, the rats could remember things, as they regained their long-term memory. According to the researchers involved in the study, if a prosthetic device is implanted in the brain of the animals, they could reinforce their memories. They went on saying that with sufficient information regarding the neural coding of memories, “a neural prosthesis capable of real-time identification and manipulation of the encoding process can restore and even enhance cognitive mnemonic processes.”
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