Innovative Brain-Wide Mapping Reveals a Single Memory is Stored Across Many Connected Brain Regions

upstart writes:

Innovative Brain-Wide Mapping Reveals a Single Memory Is Stored Across Many Connected Brain Regions:

A new study from 's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory provides the most extensive and rigorous evidence yet that the mammalian brain retains a single memory across a broadly distributed, functionally integrated complex spanning many brain regions, rather than in just one or a few spots.

Memory research pioneer Richard Semon had predicted such a "unified engram complex" more than a century ago, but achieving the new study's confirmation of his hypothesis required the application of multiple newly developed technologies. The researchers found and ranked dozens of previously unknown memory-related areas in the study, demonstrating that memory recall becomes more behaviorally powerful when multiple memory-storing regions are reactivated rather than just one.

"When talking about memory storage we all usually talk about the hippocampus or the cortex," said co-lead and co-corresponding author Dheeraj Roy. He began the research while a graduate student in the RIKEN-MIT Laboratory for Neural Circuit Genetics at The Picower Institute led by senior author Susumu Tonegawa, Picower Professor in the Departments of Biology and Brain and Cognitive Sciences. "This study reflects the most comprehensive description of memory encoding cells, or memory 'engrams,' distributed across the brain, not just in the well-known memory regions. It basically provides the first rank-ordered list for high-probability engram regions. This list should lead to many future studies, which we are excited about, both in our labs and by other groups."

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