Save a Copy

It’s a good idea to keep a backup copy of any important documents somewhere separate, just in case anything happens to the original. Our clever brains do something similar with memories, storing them across a wide connected complex spanning different brain regions, rather than locking them all away in one single spot. This long-hypothesised ‘unified engram complex’ has been confirmed in a new study that analysed 247 brain regions in mice. The researchers visualised brain activity during memory encoding (top) and recall (bottom), and saw activity and clear overlap in more regions than previously thought. Further experiments successfully triggered memories by stimulating different areas of the complex, but confirmed that recall was stronger when multiple regions were involved at once. This distribution may allow memory recall even if some areas are damaged or diseased, which could suggest new targets for clinical approaches to tackle memory loss.

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.

Website

• Video by Dheeraj S. Roy, Young-Gyun Park, Minyoung E. Kim, Ying Zhang and Sachie K. Ogawa, and colleagues
• RIKEN-MIT Laboratory for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, Department of Biology and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, April 2022