FAULTY MEMORY

Memory is notoriously unreliable: Eyewitnesses have sent innocent people to jail, and two people can give conflicting accounts about the same event. In a new study, The New York Timesreports, MIT researchers have shown how false memories can form—and how they might even be implanted. (click below to read more)
The researchers placed mice in an unfamiliar box and used chemical tags to mark the cells in the hippocampus portion of their brains that became active as a memory of their surroundings formed. Then, they transferred them to a different box and gave them an uncomfortable electric shock while stimulating the brain cells they’d marked in the first box. When they finally returned the mice to the original, harmless box, the rodents stiffened in fear—suggesting that they remembered, wrongly, that it was where they’d been shocked. The mice didn’t feel frightened when transferred to other new boxes, showing they had a specific false memory attached to the original box. Human brains likely encode memories in a similar way, and the research should “make people realize even more than before how unreliable human memory is,” says study author Susumu Tonegawa.