Inception-Style Memory Experiment Performed On Mice Was Inspired By The Movie “Total Recall” “The underlying grip of movies is that they program us to have experiences. They create events in our heads…” -- Jeffrey Zacks, Flicker: Your Brain On Film. Forthcoming from Oxford University Press If you’re interested in science, you probably heard last week’s news that memories were successfully implanted in the brains of mice. In a study led by Steve Ramirez of MIT, published in Science, and covered by nearly every major news outlet including us, a mouse’s behavior could be manipulated by implanting a past experience directly into its brain. This is the stuff of The Matrix or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: decoding experiences from neural patterns and creating false ones that feel real. But the story behind the science has been largely skipped. Where did the idea come from? Hollywood, as it turns out. Steve Ramirez is a PhD student in the lab of Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa. He’s also the college roommate of Co.Labs’ News Hacker Gabe Stein; and, like me before I became a journalist, he studies the brain basis of memory. I spent three years in labs at Princeton, Kyoto, and St. Louis studying how memory happens in humans. Like Steve’s lab, the ones where I worked were searching for memories in the brain—the “temporary constellations,” as Harvard scientist Dan Schacter calls them, that light up when a person lives an event and then echo back when the event is recalled. So I was eager to pick the brain of the world’s first-ever “memory inceptor” about where he gets his ideas. Eavesdropping On The Brain Here’s how it all worked. The experimenters used flashes of light directed into the brain of the mouse to convey the neural patterns representing a dwelling place--let’s call it Box A--where the mouse had been before. They did this while administering a shock to the mouse in a new place, Box B. That shock created a negative experience while the flashes of light were imprinting upon the mouse that he was in the earlier box; the idea being to connect the sensation of being in Box A with a bad memory. Read Full Story bit.ly/1312dzZ #Tech #Technology #News #Updates #Like #Follow #Comment
Posted on: Wed, 07 Aug 2013 20:23:32 +0000
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