December 2007
19 posts
1 tag
SuperCool World
Imagine a world where you could defy any laws of physics, from gravitation to electromagnetism. Not a world of superheroes in comic books, but a world where liquids and solids would become super-cool matter.
In this world you would plug magnets under your feet and levitate to go to work. Electrical wires would never get hot and any liquid would squeeze through impossibly small holes. Spinning...
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Erasing Memory
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 ...
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Scientists at Work
In a small and dark laboratory at the Picower Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a rat sits comfortably in a shine black plastic box. His long white and massive tail impress the visitors. He looks like a hybrid animal coming out of a Star Trek picture. A small metal chip implanted into his minuscule brain delicately deforms his scalp. Through that implant, scientists can record his neurons...
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Where do you think your memories get stored ?...
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What specific memory would you first erase ?
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Your Say
To understand how memory works, how it is formed and gets stored in our brains, neuroscientists are developing new techniques to erase rats’ memories. At first glance, their work can look scary because it seems that for better or worse, our memories build our identity. As a consequence, we can’t help thinking about the implications of such research. Are we assisting in the birth of...
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If you had the power to erase memory, would you...
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How do you feel if I tell you that scientists in...
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Video Games at School ?
In NeuroMatrix, the most recent videogame developed by Morphonix LLC, a software company based in California, you play a secret agent infiltrating a neuroscience research facility. Your mission: understand why scientists can’t communicate anymore. You track down the Nanobots that have invaded their brains. If you fail, the Nanobots and the secret entity that spawned them will take over the Earth,...
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The Discovery of LTP
The plasticity of the brain is its lifelong ability to reorganize neural pathways based on new experience. Imagine making an impression of a coin in a lump of clay. In order for the impression of the coin to appear in the clay, the shape of the clay changes as the coin is pressed into it. Similarly, the neural circuitry in the brain must reorganize in response to experience or sensory ...
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Scientists know from experiments made in the...
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Todd Sacktor talking about the potential...
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The molecules of memory
In the 1990’s, Todd Sacktor, neurologist and molecular biologist at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, discovered that PKmZeta, persistently expressed and found only in the brain, was the enzyme implicated in the formation of memory. “Basically, I guessed! But it was an educated guest,” he says. Inspired by one of his professors from Columbia University,...
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Todd Sacktor explaining his experiment
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An electrical stimulation to erase memory...
Two main questions drive scientists’ quest in understanding how memory get formed and stored in the brain: how does learning occur ? And how does memory last for several years or even a life-time?
In the 1970s’, scientists proposed an artificial model, the Long Term Potentiation, that would mimic the brain plasticity, its capacity to reorganize after new experiences. They...
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Which animal to choose ?
Why do scientists...
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A Human Brain Bank
If you leave a piece of human brain at room temperature, and wait to see what happens…it will simply melt and disappear. Indeed, 80% of our brain is just made out of fat and water. That’s what Katerina Mancevska, the Assistant Director of Tissue Processing at the New-York Brain Bank explains
On the second basement floor of the Babies and Children’s Hospital of New York-...
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Listen to Katerina Mancevska, explaining how they...
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Ethical Issues
While researchers are on their way to perhaps one day erase one specific memory, they are clearly aware that they’re working on a tool that can be used for good or evil. They would certainly hope that in the case of memory impairment, it would be used to help ease suffering, not to generate problems. When asked about any of their ethical concerns, some state that the purpose of Science...