PARIS: Scientists report they’ve successfully recovered “lost memories” from mice using just light, suggesting memories lost in retrograde amnesia because of brain injuries aren’t gone but rather have become “hidden.”
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers say they’ve recovered memories in mice by using pulses of blue light to stimulate neurons in their brains, evidence that memories believed destroyed in certain kinds of amnesia still exist, undamaged but inaccessible.
In an laboratory experiment, mice in a cage were given a small electric shock, the memory of which made them freeze out of fear in anticipation of receiving an additional shock when they were returned to the same enclosure later.
The experiment was then repeated, but the mice were administered a drug that prevented the consolidation of the memory. They displayed no similar signs of fear when returned to the cage as their memories of the disagreeable shock appear to have been completely “lost.”
However, the researchers say they were able to restore that fear memory using a technique called optogenetics to directly stimulate the neurons where the memory was encoded, which caused the mice to suddenly revert to their “fear-based” behavior – they now remembered the shock experience.
In optogenics, researchers can target individual neurons in the brain and use an engineered virus to tag them with a special protein that makes them sensitive to light.
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