Scientists plant false memories in mice

Scientists plant false memories in mice


Save Story
Leer en español

Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes

This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.

SALT LAKE CITY — Scientists have found a way to recode a mouse’s brain and make it remember experiences it never had.

The scientists behind the experiment hope to shed light on why people remember events that didn't happen. One of the driving forces behind the study was unreliable and false statements made in court and court documents. Overall, the study found memories can be unreliable and posed the question whether a person can really trust their own memory.

“Memory is usually a good guide for our current decisions, but under certain conditions, it could mislead us terribly,” neuroscientists Susumu Tonegawa, one of the researchers behind the study, said in an interview with Science Magazine.

The research team's findings, based on the manipulation of engineered brain cells, showed false memories are planted the same way real memories are sealed.

Tonegawa and his team first put the mice in a chamber to explore their surroundings. The next day, the mice were placed into a different chamber and given an electric shock in their feet while being shone a light to encite memories from the first chamber.


Because our study showed that the false memories and the genuine memories are based on very similar ... it's difficult for the false memory bearer to distinguish between them.

–Susumu Tonegawa


“We call this incepting or implanting false memory in mouse brain, utilizing the cutting edge technology we call optogenetics,” Tonegawa said.

The light shone to the mice triggered the memory of the first chamber because of a protein called channelrhodopsin, which is part of the optogenetics process Tonegawa cited. Brain cells engineered by his team contained the protein channelrhodopsin, a light-sensitive gene.

Because of that association of light with electroshock, Tonegawa’s team found when the mice were put back into the first chamber, they froze and waited for the shock to come.

As for what the discovery means for humans, Tonegawa said the process is from mice to humans when establishing false memories of an event.

“Because our study showed that the false memories and the genuine memories are based on very similar, almost identical brain mechanisms, it’s difficult for the false memory bearer to distinguish between them,” Tonegawa said. “We hope our current and our future findings along these lines will further allot researchers and legal experts how unreliable memory can be.”

Related stories

Most recent Science stories

Related topics

Science
Cait Orton

    STAY IN THE KNOW

    Get informative articles and interesting stories delivered to your inbox weekly. Subscribe to the KSL.com Trending 5.
    By subscribing, you acknowledge and agree to KSL.com's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

    KSL Weather Forecast