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Phoenix666 writes:

While the romantic poets' idea of memories being akin to spirits may have poetic merit, the scientists' perspective is that memories are concrete, physical entities that can be visualized within various regions of the brain.

Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have now for the first time identified a sub-region in the brain that works to form a particular kind of memory: fear-associated with a specific environmental cue or "contextual fear memory."
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In particular, the study showed new protein synthesis in a specific sub-region of the prefrontal cortex known in rodents as the prelimbic. In humans, this area corresponds to the anterior cortex, which has been linked to processing emotional responses. Initially, Puthanveettil and his colleagues ignored the medial prefrontal cortex because no one believed that it had anything to do with early encoding of long term memories.

However, when they closely examined the effects on the brain of conditioning rodents with a mild foot shock, the scientists found several messenger RNAs recruited to polyribosomes in the medial prefrontal cortex -- a clear indication of new protein synthesis there.

Puthanveettil and his colleagues also discovered that if they inhibited new protein synthesis in the prelimbic region right after fear conditioning took place, those memories did not form. But if the researchers waited just a few hours, inhibiting protein synthesis in prelimbic cortex had no impact and the memories took hold. There is temporal and spatial regulation of new protein synthesis in the medial prefrontal cortex.

An abstract of the paper "Encoding of Contextual fear Memory Requires de novo Proteins in the Prelimbic Cortex" is available.

When the scientists inhibited new protein synthesis in the prelimbic region after fear conditioning, the rats formed no new memories. The finding could help avoid PTSD.

Original Submission