Remembering Memories

Memories are stored in our brain like photographs in a vast archive, where some things are easier to find than others. But rather than boxes, they’re kept in brain cells, as physical or chemical changes called engrams (red in the brain section above). Diseases that affect memories are devastating, and being able to retrieve lost ones would be fantastic. That’s what a new study might have achieved. Researchers taught mice fear of a particular place, but prevented that lesson from sticking by obstructing a protein that helps bind memory and experience, so the mice didn’t actually appear frightened. However, these silent fear memories could be retrieved when the engrams were ‘switched on’ using precise beams of light in the brain. This transforms what we know about the archives in our mind, although remember this research is still a very long way from being able to give you the perfect memory.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Dheeraj S. Roy and colleagues
• RIKEN-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, Department of Biology and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA
• Image copyright held by original authors; image reproduction permitted by PNAS
• Published in PNAS, November 2017