Can We Foresee The Dangers Of Messing With Memory?
You may have heard about last week's announcement that scientists implanted false memories in laboratory mice. The paper, published by Nobel Laureate Susumu Tonegawa and co-authors in the journal Science, explains how mice were caused to "remember" a scary an environment that was actually neutral.
Here's the procedure in a nutshell: Hippocampus neurons of mice firing to make memories in a non-scary environment were labeled, then activated with light when the animals were put into a second, different environment. In this second location, during the neurons' forced activation — when the act of remembering the first environment was underway — the mice received mild foot shocks.
The BBC reports:
Later when the mouse was put back into the first environment, it showed behavioural signs of fear, indicating it had formed a false fear memory for the first environment, where it was never shocked in reality.