EvaZadeh

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How do you feel if I tell you that scientists in their labs are currently erasing rats’ memory ?

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 an Orwellian project? What if one day the techniques fell into the hands of a dangerous political party? What power could it give to the government? More than only accessing memories, they would penetrate into our brain, and manipulate our inner self and deep thoughts.

Where do you think your memories get stored ? How do you think it works ?

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What specific memory would you first erase ?

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If you had the power to erase memory, would you use it on yourself ? On other people ?

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, reprogramming the human brain into docile submission.

This NIH-funded action videogame not only has 11 to 14 year-old kids play in a 3D real-time environment, but it has them learn about how their brain works at the same time.

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 stimulation. Neurologists all agree that memories are formed in the hippocampus, a bean-shaped area of the brain, involved in learning. But the mechanism had been an assumption for more than three decades.