It also could help explain how diseases like Alzheimer’s make it harder for people to form new memories, Fried says.
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First of all the investigators identified the neurons which reacted to pictures of a specific celebrity like Jennifer Aniston or Clint Eastwood. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga at the University of Leicester and Dr. Itzhak Fried at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.
‘We had hypothesised that we’d be able to see some changes in the firing of the neurons, ‘ said Matias Ison, Lecturer in Bioengineering, University of Leicester.
“The astonishing fact was that these changes were dramatic, occurring at the exact moment of learning, even after one trial”.
The researchers involved in the study concentrated on examining the neurons in the medial temporal lobe which are associated with episodic memory. Now, doctors have discovered how memories are being formed rather than forgotten.
The patients were first presented with images of celebrities, including Jennifer Aniston, Clint Eastwood and Halle Berry. In the first stage, the patients were shown images of people – family members and famous personalities – and places like the Eiffel Tower and the White House. Dr, Fried also oversees a large team at UCLA that is now engaged in a multidisciplinary effort to develop both software and hardware for a neuro-prosthetic device, which may restore episodic memory function in neurological patients.
Scientists at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland took a look at how memories form through speciliased brain connections called synapses. That is when the neurons in the medial temporal lobe changed their behavior.
The team’s simulations suggested that memory formation and recall follows a “well-orchestrated combination”.
Researchers said on Wednesday studies relating to people suffering electrodes internet in the wisdom has demonstrated that particular neurons within the location known as mean earthly lobe use a principal part in quickly creating the majority of these recollections.
“It was impressive to see how individual neurons signaled the learning of new contextual associations between people and places and that the changes in firing could occur just after one instance”, says Dr. Ison.
Then the researchers separated the pictures, as it turns out when the leaning tower was shown again, the Clint Eastwood neuron began firing as well. Episodic memory refers to the brain’s ability to remember events which took place in the past such as meeting an old friend in an unusual place.
However, animal studies are limited in what they can tell us, because the experiments are reliant on extensive reward-based training with stimuli that are not natural. “This is critical to understanding the neural processes underlying real-life memory formation, as in real life we are not repeatedly exposed to an event in order to remember it – just one exposure is enough”.
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The findings could lead to development of new therapies to improve the lives of neurological patients with memory impairment, such as in Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injury, or epilepsy. Alzheimer’s is an affection that juggles with memory and brain processes and if scientists become aware of all the associations in the brain leading to memory formation, maybe Alzheimer’s can somewhere in the future be reversed and memories could be brought back.
