Jurgen Gotz commenting for Cosmos on exiting story on memory storage that has been published in Science.
Tags likely exist in human brains
Bontempi said the findings surrounding ‘tagging’ and memory storage could have potential applications in the medical field for humans. “We think this process should be present across different species and there is no reason to believe these tags don’t exist in human brains,” he said. “If we can figure out how to act on these tags then we might be on our way to improving remote memory.”
Jürgen Götz, director of the Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s laboratories at the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Research Institute, agreed that the research could have potential implications for Alzheimer’s.
“By understanding how memory is formed one can also understand how memory is lost. Alzheimer’s patients often memorise what they learned a long time ago but forget the memories they have acquired recently,” said Götz, who was not involved with the study.
“The researchers looked into both recent and remote memories and determined the molecular and network changes underlying their formation. As the hippocampus is affected early on in the degenerative process in Alzheimer’s disease, understanding its role in enduring memory formation may be critical in understanding the steps leading to dementia.”
Cosmos article covering news:
www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/4074/rats-reveal-how-memories-are-stored
Paper published in Science. 2011 Feb 18;331(6019):924-8., Lesburguères E, Gobbo OL, Alaux-Cantin S, Hambucken A, Trifilieff P, Bontempi B.: Early tagging of cortical networks is required for the formation of enduring associative memory
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21330548
