An ‘on-off’ switch for memory?
For the first time, scientists last week recreated the brain’s learning process and can restore long-forgotten memories. Scientists have developed an on-off switch in memory, using ‘brain prosthesis’, which has helped rats retrieve long-forgotten memories.
For the first time, scientists last week recreated the brain’s learning process and can restore long-forgotten memories.
Scientists have developed an on-off switch in memory, using ‘brain prosthesis’, which has helped rats retrieve long-forgotten memories.
The treatment could one day help people who suffer from memory loss due to dementia, stroke or brain injury.
The brain prosthesis marked the first time US researchers had been able to duplicate the brain’s learning process, restoring memories that test rats were drugged to forget, and could offer hope for people with dementia.
“Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget,” said Theodore Berger of the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering’s Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Working with scientists from North Carolina’s Wake Forest University Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Mr Berger’s team focused on the hippocampus, the section of the brain where memories are made.
The communication between two regions of the hippocampus results in a short-term memory being converted into a long-term memory.
The team studied the signals sent between these subregions as rats learned a task that involved pressing a lever in order to get a reward. Through repetition, the rats learned the behaviour as a long-term memory.
When scientists drugged the rats to halt neuron signals between the two regions, the rats forgot the long-term memory. But when scientists implanted an electronic brain prosthetic that duplicated the signaling process between the subregions, the rats could remember again.
In normal rats, “the device could actually strengthen the memory being generated internally in the brain and enhance the memory capability”.
The team also hopes to test the device in monkeys.
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