Image by Getty / Futurism Neuroscience/Brain Science
Anyone who makes a habit of losing their keys has a new excuse: you didn't forget — your memory just moved.
That's courtesy of neuroscientists at Northwestern University, who recently published a study looking into the brain patterns of mice.
The new research explores how the hippocampus — a crucial part of the brain for spatial memory — changes over time. The paper sheds new light on a phenomenon first uncovered in 2013, when a study in the journal Nature Neuroscience found that neurons in the hippocampus can change their patterns over time — that memories related to place, in a meta twist, are literally moving around in the brain.
To conduct the experiment, mice were set on a treadmill flanked by screens on all sides. The screens showed the innards of a maze, which the mice were able to explore based on how they navigated the treadmill. A familiar scent was likewise pumped in, while white noise was played in the background.
Though the mice were subjected to a number of cardio sessions over several days, the layout of the maze, the scent, and the noise for the control group remained the same throughout.
Using high-tech imaging devices to track brain activity in real-time, the Northwestern researchers observed changes in the mouse's brains as they navigated the virtual environment.
Interestingly, the researchers found that this recently-uncovered neuron-shifting phenomenon, termed "representation drift," occurred regardless of changes to the mouse's environment.
The results would seem to dispel the idea that representation drift has mostly to do with a mouse's surroundings — the exact opposite hypothesis the researchers went in with.
"I was sure we were going to reduce this representational drift," Daniel Dombeck, the lead author of the study told Live Science. "I was sure that the memory was going to look more stable over days — and that's not what we found."
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