Everyone knows tricks our memory plays on us sometimes. Have you ever experienced the feeling of remembering images, words and events that in fact were nothing but a figment of your imagination and never took place in reality?
Maybe it was a call to your friend that you were sure to have made when
you found out that he changed his number. Or you remember very well to
have put something somewhere and still it is not there.
Such situations definitely cause strange feelings to us. What exactly happens in the brain and leads in creating false images in our memory?
According to scientists the occurrence of such false memories is quite common. Researchers at the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics in Saitama, Japan, created a false memory in a lab mouse in their attempt to collect data and analyze how the human brain creates and processes memories.
Mice cannot be people but the basic functions of memory in mammals are
evolutionarily ancient. Both mice and humans form memories in a
hippocampal area of the brain called the dentate helix.
Nobel laureate for his work in immunology Dr. Tonegawa and his team did an experiment on it.
On the first day the scientists put the mouse in a particular
environment and let it get used to remember it, which allow them to
identify the brain cells engaged in the formation of the memory.
On the second day, the researchers put the mouse in a completely
different environment where it was subjected to electroshock. At the
same time they identified and stimulated the brain cells which kept the
previous memory to bring it back.
On the next day the mouse was put in the first environment. As a result,
it felt uncomfortable and cringed in fear, which means that it was expecting the electroshock though it never took place in this environment.
Inception of false memories into mice (Credit: Collective Next)
The question of why the brain creates false memories has
not been answered yet, but it’s a fact. Nobody knows whether the brain
creates such detailed false images and scenes due to the natural tendency of human to envision or if it is just a unexplained process that occurs in the human brain…
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