Repeat after me: The Gulags never existed....
Posted on 03/08/2011 1:18:04 PM PST by Red Badger
Even long after it is formed, a memory in rats can be enhanced or erased by increasing or decreasing the activity of a brain enzyme, say researchers supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health.
"Our study is the first to demonstrate that, in the context of a functioning brain in a behaving animal, a single molecule, PKMzeta, is both necessary and sufficient for maintaining long-term memory," explained Todd Sacktor, of the SUNY Downstate Medical Center, New York City, a grantee of the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health.
Sacktor, Yadin Dudai, Ph.D., of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, and colleagues, report of their discovery March 4, 2011 in the journal Science.
Unlike other recently discovered approaches to memory enhancement, the PKMzeta mechanism appears to work any time. It is not dependent on exploiting time-limited windows when a memory becomes temporarily fragile and changeable -- just after learning and upon retrieval -- which may expire as a memory grows older, says Sacktor.
"This pivotal mechanism could become a target for treatments to help manage debilitating emotional memories in anxiety disorders and for enhancing faltering memories in disorders of aging," said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D.
In their earlier studies, Sacktor's team showed that even weeks after rats learned to associate a nauseating sensation with saccharin and shunned the sweet taste, their sweet tooth returned within a couple of hours after rats received a chemical that blocked the enzyme PKMzeta in the brain's outer mantle, or neocortex, where long-term memories are stored.
In the new study, they paired genetic engineering with the same aversive learning model to both confirm the earlier studies and to demonstrate, by increasing PKMzeta, the opposite effect.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Can they just erase the crappy memories? ;-)
Now if they could just find one for the short ter....
What?
Wonder how they know what rats remember?
They might erase too much.......oops!........
It’s in the article.........
They test them.
Ha, ha, yes, being the crabby old coot that I am, I am suspicious of wild, new technology. I would never trust a Star Trek transporter - one might arrive all rearranged incorrectly.
“They test them”.
Essay or multiple choice?
I think they need to do further tests on Harry Reid. He has shown a highly selective memory as have most of the other rats in congress.
Now I understand what the aliens are after....
[IMG]http://khackney.typepad.com/photos/handmade_dvds/i_come_in_peace_cover.jpg[/IMG]
I always knew democrats were deficient in an important enzyme.
Perhaps we could use this technology to erase all memory of the Obamacare debacle in all the RATS in DC. LOL.
To a Liberal, history started at breakfast this morning.......Ann Coulter.......
Harry ‘The Rat’ Reid. Seems like I saw him box way back when.
Repeat after me: The Gulags never existed....
Rat SAT?...........
A long-time friend of mine gave me a great line about our memory lapses as we get older. He said:
It’s not a ‘loss of memory’ problem, it’s a ‘memory retrieval’ problem. A ‘lost’ memory is really not lost at all; it’s there, but the retrieval system doesn’t work so well sometimes, in our ‘sunset’ years.
His idea seems to make scientific sense, as this report claims, in as much as certain enzymes can help ‘restore’ memories. And, even without the aid of science, we ourselves sometimes find a ‘lost’ memory - sometimes even very unexpectedly and sometimes out of context of anything we are doing at the moment.
They had to still be there, and not missing at all, in order to be ‘found’ again.
We should learn to start referring to this whole issue as the issue of “misplaced” memories.
They remember how to get back to Madison to vote.
I can see a use for this enzyme in terrorist interrogations used along with sodium pentothal..............
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