Erasing Memory
December 20th, 2007
In October of 2006, I interviewed Jonathan Whitlock, a post-doctorate associate at the Picower Institute at that time. On that day, he lighted up my fascination for memory, and its mechanisms in the human brain. At the end of the interview, he launched that he was erasing rats’ memory. And the whole story began.
Whitlock explained me he had trained a rat to avoid the dark side of a two- compartment box by giving him mild foot shocks whenever he entered that side. After the rat learned that task, Whitlock used an array of electrodes to listen in on many places at the same time in his hippocampus. Once he eavesdrops on the hard-to-detect signal of the memory forming, he manipulated it with the goal of impairing the memory.
“The idea is to watch the initial changes set in motion by learning, and reverse those changes applying the inverse patterned electrical stimulation,” he explained. When Whitlock put the rat back in the box, he said he didn’t remember he had to avoid the dark side. He got trained again and the responses to learning reappeared. His brain was intact and hadn’t been damaged.
Read more here
January 9th, 2008 at 06:56 PM
j ai bien tout compri grace à tes explications préalables ! mais vraiment c est super interessant! je t ajoute à mes favoris!
January 9th, 2008 at 07:18 PM
Nice Job Eva. Tres bien?!