A “memory switch” successfully tested on rats in the United States

Written by Sandeep Nehra

A team of U.S. researchers has successfully tested a process to enable and disable memory in rats, and could in the long run, help people with dementia or other brain injuries.

The researchers implanted a prosthesis in the brains of animals, to reactivate their memories removed from memory by drugs.

“Turn on the switch and the rats remember. Turn it off and forget about the rats,” summarizes Theodore Berger of the department of biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California.

Mr. Berger and his colleagues have partnered with researchers from the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Wake Forest University in North Carolina to perform these tests.

The researchers focused their experiments on the hippocampus of rats, the party, as in humans, focusing the memory in the brain.

Communication between two regions of the hippocampus enables the conversion of short-term memory into long-term memory.

U.S. researchers have studied the signals between the two regions, called CA3 and CA1, during an experiment where rats received a reward when they a lever. As in, the rats treated this behavior and have converted to long-term memory.

The researchers then administered a substance to animals to interrupt communication between the two regions and thus make them “forget” the long-term memory.

It was then that scientists have implanted animals an electronic device that reproduces the signals transmitted between the two regions CA3 and CA1. As a result, the memory of rats was reactivated.

Even better, the researchers said in their study published in the Journal of Neural Engineering when they tested the device on rats ‘normal’, “the unit has improved the memory capacity” of animals.

The team now wants to test his method on monkeys and hopes to one day help humans suffering from memory impairment due to dementia, stroke or trauma.

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