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Engrams emerging as the basic unit of memory:
Though scientist Richard Semon introduced the concept of the "engram" 115 years ago to posit a neural basis for memory, direct evidence for engrams has only begun to accumulate recently as sophisticated technologies and methods have become available. In a new review in Science, Professors Susumu Tonegawa of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT and Sheena Josselyn of the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and the University of Toronto describe the rapid progress they and colleagues have been making over the last dozen years in identifying, characterizing and even manipulating engrams, as well as the major outstanding questions of the field.
Experiments in rodents have revealed that engrams exist as multiscale networks of neurons. An experience becomes stored as a potentially retrievable memory in the brain when excited neurons in a brain region such as the hippocampus or amygdala become recruited into a local ensemble. These ensembles combine with others in other regions, such as the cortex, into an "engram complex." Crucial to this process of linking engram cells is the ability of neurons to forge new circuit connections, via processes known as "synaptic plasticity" and "dendritic spine formation." Importantly, experiments show that the memory initially stored across an engram complex can be retrieved by its reactivation but may also persist "silently" even when memories cannot be naturally recalled, for instance in mouse models used to study memory disorders such as early stage Alzheimer's disease.
(Score: 5, Informative) by NickM on Sunday January 05 2020, @01:16AM (3 children)
That is pretty awesome and creepy: artificial aversion or repulsion to a smell the mouse never experienced ! I can accord you that the linked press release is kind of thin but the source material is quite dense in information. Also to those who don't have acces remember about sci-hub.tw !
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday January 05 2020, @03:45AM
Well, I may never have smelled 3-week-old dead cow, but I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't need to have a false memory implanted to experience revulsion to it.
For proof, we'd need to test for something the animal was normally attracted to.
Thought of the day: "After you stop using social media and online videos long enough you no longer have the free time for them."
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mer on Sunday January 05 2020, @07:10AM (1 child)
And just with that, we can put total recall on the list of things that are indefinitely twenty years away.
(minus the mars colony bit, that's indefinitely ten years away).
Shut up!, he explained.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @08:47PM
Only ten years between them? Weren't some of the poor martian locals supposedly born there?