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Long-term memory of specific places is stored in the brain’s place cells. A team of neuroscientists headed by Dr. Andrea Burgalossi of the University of Tübingen’s Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN) have reprogrammed place cells in free-roaming mice, by sending electrical impulses directly to their neurons. After stimulation, these cells were reprogrammed in the place-related activity switched to the location where the stimulation was performed.
Human sense of past is always connected with recognition of what is present is the most important building block of human identity. Long-term memory keeps human functional in daily activities. Brain relies on stable representations to form long-term memories, it matches a subset of neurons in the hippocampus-a centrally located brain area crucial to memory formation place cells. The memory of a given environment is thought to be stored as a specific combination of place-cell activity in the hippocampus-the place map.
Place maps remain stable as long as we are in the same environment, but reorganize their activity patterns in different locations, creating a new place map for each environment. The researchers targeted individual place cells in a mouse’s brain and stimulated them in a different location from where they had originally been active. In a significant number of cases, the activity of the place cells could be ‘reprogrammed’: the cells stopped firing in the original locations, and became active in the area where the electrical stimulation was delivered.
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