Do you remember the taste of breast milk? Do you know which song the mother used to send you to sleep? Can you explain why you would rather wear a diaper than a high-end toy?
If you can't answer it, it's normal.
Most adults cannot recall what happened before the age of three, and “baby amnesia†has even become a terminology. Not long ago, Paul Frankland of the University of Toronto and his neurology team announced the successful restoration of the fear memory of adult mice in infancy, and the results were published in the journal Contemporary Biology.
I remembered, you bullied me!
The researchers first trained 17-day-old babies and 60-day-old babies. Simply put them in the "small black house" (training box) and used the electric stimulation of the foot to scare them. The mouse was scared and motionless.
In the next few days, these mice will be brought back to the little black house. It turns out that no matter how many days (90 days) in the past, those young rats will once again show a frightening reaction, showing that they remember there is danger. The baby rat forgot about this unpleasant experience after 15 days. This is equivalent to forgetting the memory of infancy at the age of seven.
Next, the researchers labeled the hippocampus cells that were active in the fear context with the light-sensitive protein ChR2, and then reactivated them by optogenetics. This time, when the mouse returns to the small black room, it will show a fear reaction in both nerves and behavior. The experiment also set up multiple sets of controls to verify the validity of the results.
Steve Ramirez, a neurobiologist at Boston University in the United States, explained: "This shows that the infancy memory of adult mice has not disappeared, it is only dormant, and can be artificially awakened."
Don't underestimate this conclusion. "Where is the memory?" is a classic issue with a long history and controversy.
Hey, where is the memory?
Imagine that the brain is like a library with a winding path, and we can't read the documents recorded before the age of three. what does this mean? Haven't these books been included since the beginning? Or are they being swept out of the library? Or are we just lost and can't find them?
Similarly, in patients with memory impairment due to illness or accident, do their memories disappear or cannot be extracted?
These problems have been plaguing people.
From the end of the 19th century, scholars represented by Freud put forward the hypothesis that memories in the early life have always existed, but they are suppressed in the subconscious. In many psychotherapy cases, psychoanalysts claim to recall the memory of the visitor being abused in his early years.
"The key to the question is whether these memories can really be recovered, and if so, how accurate they can be." Frankland told the Chinese Journal of Science and Technology, "Our findings are important for debate in this field. â€
In fact, many scientists today tend to have memories in their early years. Even the Frankland team itself published a result in 2014 that said the rapid development of nerves in mice during the baby's period, the rapid generation of new neurons will "squeeze out" the old neurons, leading to the loss of some early memories. This also seems to confirm the hypothesis of memory loss.
Xu Lin, a researcher at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the Journal of the Chinese Academy of Sciences: "I also believed that childhood memories have been pruned. But this work proves that they may still exist and may be artificially extracted. This is very significant. Scientific significance."
Hurry up and study better memory extraction.
In neurobiology, optogenetics is a commonly used new research method. Prior to this, it was also used to treat amnesia caused by drugs and amnesia caused by Alzheimer's disease in adult mice.
So can humans also find memories of their early years or treat senile dementia in this way?
"I'm afraid I can't do it for the time being." Xu Lin said, "Recent optogenetics is unlikely to be used in the human brain. After all, this technique requires craniotomy and it needs to inject a virus into the brain." Obviously this operation is not intended for anyone. accept.
In addition, light stimulation lacks purpose and orientation for memory extraction. In other words, this method does not necessarily extract the memory, and it may be that you should not think of it.
However, Xu Lin also pointed out that if it can be determined that memory has not disappeared, it is very important to further study the mechanism and method of memory extraction. “This can be a great help for amnesia and forgetfulness caused by various reasons!â€
It is worth noting that similar scientific research results have also caused discussion among academic peers. For example, although the light-stimulated mice showed a fearful reaction in the dark room, perhaps the scientists did not restore their original memories, but only triggered the original fear. The existing experimental design is not enough to distinguish between the two possibilities - after all, the mouse does not speak.
"I hope that in the future, neuroscientists can work with psychologists to help patients who have experienced childhood trauma to trace their early memories. At that time, the secrets that mice can't tell us can be told by humans," Xu Lin said.
Source: Chinese Journal of Science
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