Memories tagged posts

Mice were exposed to two auditory fear conditioning, separated by five hours. Both memories were encoded by shared neurons in the lateral amygdala while they were encoded by different neurons in the auditory cortex. Mice showed freezing behavior in response to 7kHz and 2kHz tones. Induction of optical long term depotentiation (LTD) to synapses specific to 7kHz fear memory, erased only that memory (test 3) without affecting the other memory (test 4) that was stored in shared neuron ensemble.
Credit: Kaoru Inokuchi, Kareem Abdou

Memories are formed through long-term changes in synaptic efficacy, a process known as synaptic plasticity, and are stored in the brain in specific neuronal ensembles called engram cells, which are activated during corresponding events...

Scientists at NIH used electrical recordings to study how the human brain remembers.
Credit: Courtesy of Zaghloul lab, NIH/NINDS

In a pair of studies, scientists at the National Institutes of Health explored how the human brain remembers. One study suggests that the brain etches each memory into unique firing patterns of individual neurons. Meanwhile, the second study suggests that the brain replays memories faster than they are stored. The studies were led by Kareem Zaghloul, M.D., Ph.D., a neurosurgeon-researcher at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). Persons with drug resistant epilepsy in protocols studying surgical resection of their seizure focus at the NIH’s Clinical Center enrolled in this study. To help locate the source of the seizures, Dr...

When a friend or relative visits, the Remember Me! app displays photos as a reminder of the connection to that person.

People suffering from Alzheimer’s and other forms of age-related dementia sometimes have trouble recognizing friends and family or knowing what to talk about when they visit. A new app created by a group of Cornell students offers to help patients stay connected to their memories – and thus to their friends and family – and perhaps will even help them keep a conversation going.

Remember Me! is a smartphone app developed by engineering master’s degree graduates Karthik Venkataramaiah, Vishal Kumkar, Shivananda Pujeri and Mihir Shah. They demonstrated their work at the 123rd Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education St...

As control mice run along a track, the brain map of their environment isregularly updated through the neural circuitry in the hippocampus (left side of image). Without input from area CA3 in the hippocampus, the neural code that represents where the mutant mouse has come from (past coding) and is going (future coding) becomes disordered with only the current location remaining intact (right side of image). Credit: RIKEN

Neurons need well-waves of activity to organize memories across time. In the hippocampus, temporal ordering of the neural code is important for building a mental map of where you’ve been, where you are, and where you are going. RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan has pinpointed how the neurons that represent space in mice stay in time.

As a mouse navigates its environmen...