Scientists see new memory forming in the brain

[Al-khiyal]

July 25, 2007 -- Scientists have witnessed a new memory being formed for the first time, a breakthrough they believe will pave the way to map memories across the brain.

High-resolution images captured by the team show how connections between neighbouring brain cells changed when a memory was laid down.

The feat marks the end of a century-long search by scientists to see the "face" of a new memory, a hunt which began when the psychology historian Theodore Ribot first postulated the cellular basis of memories in his late 19th century book Diseases of Memory.

A team led by Gary Lynch, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Irvine, found that the memory formed when a rat learned to navigate a maze was written in the brain by changes to 10,000 synapses, the microscopic connections that allow nerve cells in the brain to talk to each other.

Each synapse is one thousandth of a millimetre across.

"Confirming that Ribot was right will send a sigh of relief through the field, because it is often the case in science that what we feel should happen turns out not to be what happens," said Prof Lynch.

"The larger consequence is that now we can see these, the route is open for us to map where memories are located," he said.

"So much of our thinking about memories is intuited, and this may help answer questions such as 'what is a memory'," he added.

The team used three groups of rats in their study.

One group was let loose in a maze for periods of half an hour and soon learned their way around it.

Another group was given a drug that is known to block the formation of memories. The last group was used as a control.

After the rats had time to learn their way around the maze, the scientists examined sections of tissue in a tiny part of the hippocampus, a region of the brain linked to memory and navigation.

Within the brain region they were able to use fluorescent antibodies to highlight nerve connections that had recently been strengthened.

The scientists used a new technique called restorative deconvolution microscopy to focus on one million synapses and found that 1% were enlarged, and had formed stronger connections with neighbouring brain cells.

The study appears in the Journal of Neuroscience.

"This was the first time anyone had seen the changes in synapses that produce a memory," Prof Lynch said.

Scientists see new memory forming in the brain

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Finally that is great news

[Al-khiyal]

November, 1999: Scientists see memory creation

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Memory