Scientists have succeeded in recovering "lost" memories from inferfested life

you remember the taste of breast milk? Do you know which song Mom used to send you to sleep? Can you explain why you'd rather play with diapers than touch high-end toys?
if you can't answer, it's normal.
most adults can't recall what happened before the age of three, and "baby amnesia" has even become a co-term. But not long ago, Paul Frankland of the University of Toronto in Canada and his neurology team announced the successful restoration of fear memories in adult mice in infested, the results of which were published
Journal.researchers first trained 17-day-old baby mice and 60-day-old adult rats to simply lock them in "little black houses" (training boxes) and scare them with a foot-to-bottom electric stimulation. The mouse was frightened into motionless.
the mice would be brought back to the little black house for different days afterwards. It turned out that no matter how many days (90 days) the adult mice showed a reactive panic reaction, showing that they remembered the danger. The baby mouse forgot about the unpleasant experience after 15 days. This is the equivalent of a human forgetting an inferfested memory around the age of seven.
next, the researchers tagged cells in the mematic region where mice were active in a fear situation with the photogenetic protein ChR2, and then reactivated them using photogenetics. This time, when the mice returned to the little black house, they showed both nerve and behavioral fear. The experiment also set up multiple sets of controls to verify the validity of the results.
, a neurobiologist at Boston University in the United States, explains: "This suggests that the inferfernity memory of adult mice did not disappear, but only hibernate, and could be man-madely awakened." "
don't look down on this conclusion." Where's the memory," but it's a classic question with a long history and a lot of debate.imagine that the brain is like a library with a curved path, and we can't read the literature we recorded before the age of three. What does that mean? Didn't these books get included in the first time? Or were they swept out of the museum? Or are we just lost and can't find them?
, do patients with memory impairments due to illness or accident have their memories disappeared or are they not extracted?
these problems have been bothering people.
the end of the 19th century, scholars, represented by Freud, put forward the hypothesis that early memories of life existed all the time, but were suppressed in the subconscious. In many psychotherapy cases, psychothertherras claim to recall the early years of abuse.
question is whether these memories can really be recovered and, if so, how accurate they can be. Frankland told China Science Daily, "Our findings are important to the debate in this area. In
fact, many scientists today tend to have early memories that no longer exist. Even the Frankland team itself published a study in 2014 that said the rapidly developing neurons in mice's infants "crowded out" old neurons, leading to the loss of some early memory. This also seems to confirm the hypothesis of memory loss.
, a researcher at the Kunming Animal Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told China Science Daily: "I also believed that childhood memories had been trimmed. But this work proves that they may still exist and may have been extracted by man. This is of great scientific significance. In , photogenetics is a commonly used new research method. Previously, it was also used to treat drug-induced amnesia and Alzheimer's amnesia in adult mice.
is it possible for humans to retrieve early memories or treat Alzheimer's in this way?
I'm afraid not for the time being. Xu Lin said, "In the near future, photogenetics is unlikely to be used in the human brain." After all, the technology requires the opening of the skull and the injection of the virus into the brain. "Obviously not everyone is willing to accept this set of operations.
addition, light stimulation lacks purpose and orientation in the extraction of memory. That is to say, this method does not necessarily extract memories, extracted may be exactly what you should not think of.
Xu Lin also pointed out that if it can be determined that memory has not disappeared, then further study of memory extraction mechanisms and methods is very important. "This can be very helpful for amnesia and forgetfulness due to a variety of causes!"
note that similar scientific research results have also attracted discussion among academic peers. For example, although the light-stimulated mice showed a fear response in the little black house, perhaps the scientists did not restore its original memory, but merely re-triggered the original fear. The existing experimental design is not enough to distinguish between the two possibilities - after all, mice can't talk.
hope that future neuroscientists will join forces with psychologists to help patients who have experienced childhood trauma go back to their early memories," he said. At that point, mice can't tell us the secret, can be told by humans. Xu Lin said. (Source: Li Chenyang, China Science Daily)