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wolfblitzzer0: MIT scientists implant a false memory into a mouse's ...
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Jul 25, 2013 - The brains that house those neurons that form the RNA and protein ...False memories in humans often result from swapping out one detail for ...
Reconsolidation of a Long-Term Memory inLymnaea Requires New ...
www.jneurosci.org/content/23/22/8034.full.pdfby S Sangha - 2003 - Cited by 119 - Related articlesRequires New Protein and RNA Synthesis and the Soma of. Right Pedal Dorsal 1 .....ory, for example, the phenomenon of “false memory” (Thomas and Loftus ...
Top Stories: Implanting False Memories in Mice, Space Vikings, and ...
news.sciencemag.org/.../top-stories-implanting-false-memories-mice-space-...Top Stories: Implanting False Memories in Mice, Space Vikings, and More. 2013-07-26 15:15 ... NIH Effort Gambles on Mysterious Extracellular RNAs · Link to MERS Virus ...Memory Protein Fades With Age. Are We Martians After All?
'Total Recall' for Mice | Science/AAAS | News
news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2013/07/total-recall-miceJul 25, 2013 - In plants and nematodes, short RNA sequences also act like ... Our imperfect memory is inconvenient at the grocery store and ... of false memory creation and have planted such a memory in the brain of a mouse. ... neurons in the hippocampus will produce a light-sensitive protein when they become active.
Scientists devise new way to dramatically raise RNA treatment potency
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Aug 12, 2013 - Building on San Diego Research, MIT Scientists Plant False Memoriesin Mice · Voice ... “We're trying to make tools that can target any RNA motif,” said ...the RNA sequence leads to disease by binding to a particular protein, ...
Non-coding Antisense RNA Can Be Used to Stimulate Protein ...
www.sciencenewsline.com/summary/2012101617060016.htmlOct 16, 2012 - Rnas, Rna, Non-Coding, Protein, Antisense, Function, Translation, Genome ... False Memories Incepted into Mouse Brain Shed Light on Neural ...
'RNA World' Hypothesis Gets A Challenge - Science 2.0
May 27, 2012 - The ribosome is the cell's protein-building workbench and ... Lines - The Science · False Memory, False Descriptions And False Denials · Solar ...
Memory
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Long-Term Depression; Implicit Memory; Explicit Memory; Reconsolidation ... It does not require any protein synthesis or remodeling of the synapse. ... from the nearby histones, thus preventing RNA polymerase from beginning gene transcription. .... events that are repeatedly dredged up from the past ("false memories").
Evolution: Alternative splicing of RNA rewires signaling in different ...
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Dec 21, 2012 - Alternative RNA splicing (a discovery for which MIT Institute ... For example, the full version of a protein may bind to DNA at one end and .... Erasingmemories via memory reconsolidation ... reward vs. aversion: false dichotomy.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/2013/08/26/mnemodystopia-a-little-context/
Working under Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa, the MIT group reported that they had created a false memory in the brain of a mouse. “Our data,” wrote the authors inScience, “demonstrate that it is possible to generate an internally represented and behaviorally expressed fear memory via artificial means.” While the sterility reserved for scientific research abstracts tends to diffuse the élan of the work, the gravity here is apparent.
Which brings us to the cliff and the chasm.
That devil-klaxon of a sound effect from Inception always seems appropriate for heralding reports with sci-fi undertones. In the case of the closest thing we have to an actual inception, it seems particularly apt. But the group’s work is not Inception per se, and it’s certainly not Total Recall. That’s not to say it isn’t unnerving. It’s also not to say the study isn’t remarkable. More than anything, the Science paper’s publication is a reminder that neuroscience is inching over some dangerous ethical waters, and from here, it is important to tread carefully.
* * *
When Cicero wrote of the art of memory, he began with the story of Simonides of Ceos. Simonides lived in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. and is famous for inventing a few letters of the Greek alphabet. Most essentially for the purpose of this essay, he was a lyric poet who (a) was fortunate enough to not be on the receiving end of a building collapse and, (b) having recently performed in said building, could identify the mangled-beyond-recognition bodies due to his remembrance of the palatial seating chart. Cicero related Simonides’ story as the prime example of linking person with place as a memorization technique.
A far more eloquent version of the above description appears in Frances Yates’ 1966The Art of Memory, and it is the standard (Wikipedian) introduction to any deep meditation on memory improvement. The works of Yates and Cicero describe memory-training methods for budding poets—practices that consist of forming connections between places and images to build the ‘artificial memory’ necessary for recounting the epics. What was true for Yates was true for the ancient rhetors and is true today: The pairing of place with object or event, whether naturally or as a mnemonic device, represents one of the most fundamental components of memory.
This is because daily events always have a physical backdrop. Neuroscientists refer to our responses to this relationship between foreground and background as contextual behavior. Contextual memories are those that ground an object in a setting, a person in a place—episodes within a context. “Everything we experience happens somewhere,” wrote Dr. Jerry Rudy of University of Colorado, Boulder in a 2009 review of neural context representations. “[The] context often helps to select appropriate behaviors and determine the explicit and implicit content of our thoughts.” We retrace our steps because our misplaced reading glasses are associated with a specific context. Strolling into a dive bar prompts a certain mindset and behavioral catalogue that isn’t associated with, say, visiting Uncle Morris at the nursing home. Simonides didn’t identify members of the crushèd audience by their appearance: He remembered the structure of the scene.
Neuroanatomically, much of this activity is happening in and around the seahorse-shaped brain region called the hippocampus. There is no single cortical area responsible for storing a lifesworth of facts and experiences, but the hippocampus and the parahippocampal areas are always at the center of discussions on learning and memory. Dr. Tonegawa has been studying these areas and processes for years, and the false memory study is his group’s most recent success in furthering our understanding of how we remember.
Steve Ramirez, a grad student in Dr. Tonegawa’s lab and the lead author of theScience paper in question, explained the motivation for the work in a July 30 Reddit AMA:
The ultimate goal is to causally dissect the seemingly ephemeral process of memory. This way, the more and more we know about how the brain works, the better our predictions and treatments will become when broken brain pieces give rise to broken thoughts. False memories are just one of many cognitive hiccups.
People experience false memories all the time. If you’ve ever misremembered a situation, you’ve had one. We’re not really sure why they occur, especially since it’s not even immediately obvious why memory should exist in varying degrees of depth and breadth in the first place. People more or less have the same degree of hearing, but memory strength varies as much as height (though thankfully not with it). And excluding those of mnemonic savants, all memories are inherently flawed to a certain extent. True photographic memory is classified as a syndrome: something abnormal. Upon recall, our memories are refashioned by other experiences and beliefs. It’s no surprise they’re prone to intrusion.
While the scientific techniques necessary for the intentional creation of a false memory are enormously complex, Ramirez’s study had a relatively straightforward experimental framework. Imagine a mouse in a blue box. The general idea of the study was to pinpoint the cells responsible for our furry friend’s memory of the box, activate that memory while frightening the mouse in a different, say, red box, and see if the mouse’s memory of the first space changed upon returning to the blue box. If the mouse demonstrated a fear response in the blue box, where it was never made to feel afraid, the experimenters could deem the original memory altered and false. Ramirez’s boxes differed in more than color—size, floor material, lighting conditions, and scent—but the concept is the same.
It turns out that activating the tagged, banal memory during acquisition of the fear memory muddled the two together. Upon returning to their original context, mice exhibited the fear we would expect of the second context, and mice that didn’t receive the simultaneous memory activation didn’t have altered memories. It’s difficult to say how the mice actually perceived the false memories, but we can conceivably imagine something like witnessing a car accident while passively thinking of our kitchen and then inexplicably tensing up while cooking dinner.
Thus was born the era of non-pharmacological memory alteration. To allay one of the most immediate Orwellian concerns, a mouse’s false memory is only a “fear memory” out of convenience. Fear responses are easy to assess in mice—they freeze when they’re afraid—and training a mouse to fear a given context just takes delivering mild foot shocks. There’s minimal, if any, pain involved, with the sensation likely akin to the static shock we might feel rubbing our socks across carpet. In neuroscience, researchers often use such fear conditioning paradigms to assess contextual memory. Freezing is easy to quantify, and changing contexts just means swapping out an experimental chamber for a new one. One of the next agenda items for Ramirez is replicating the study with more complex memories like joy. If the work really takes off over the next couple decades, it’s the kind of technology that could, for example, be used to alter or erase the debilitating memories of post-traumatic stress disorder patients.......
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