Mice with 'amnesia' have memories restored by light - The Washington Post - 0 views
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New research shows that "lost" memories lurk in the brain waiting to be found again -- in mice, anyway. In a study published Thursday in Science, researchers were able to reactivate memories they'd suppressed, indicating that retrograde amnesia -- where memories are lost after brain trauma -- may be more of a memory retrieval problem than an actual loss of data.
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Based on their findings, the researchers believe that "lost" memories may still leave engrams active in the brain.
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When they extended the search further, they realized that other regions of the brain, including the amygdala, where where fear-based memories can be found, were also involved in this network. The researchers were therefore able to retrieve the memories because other connections in the brain — connections that were unaffected by the drug, but inaccessible without the light treatment — were storing information related to the shock treatment as well.
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"Our conclusion is that in retrograde amnesia, past memories may not be erased, but could simply be lost and inaccessible for recall," lead author Susumu Tonegawa, director of the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Saitama, Japan, said in a statement. "These findings provide striking insight into the fleeting nature of memories, and will stimulate future research on the biology of memory and its clinical restoration."
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"It's very difficult to be doing this in humans, partly for the ethical reasons — the work is invasive — but also because we tag the memories in the brain before they're learned," Tomas Ryan, a neuroscientist at MIT