Memory in sentence

1963 examples of Memory in a sentence

If you were to just completely ignore human ethics for a second and slice up my brain right now, you would see that there was an amazing number of brain regions that were active while recalling that memory.

Now one brain region that would be robustly active in particular is called the hippocampus, which for decades has been implicated in processing the kinds of memories that we hold near and dear, which also makes it an ideal target to go into and to try and find and maybe reactivate a memory.

XL: When you zoom in into the hippocampus, of course you will see lots of cells, but we are able to find which cells are involved in a particular memory, because whenever a cell is active, like when it's forming a memory, it will also leave a footprint that will later allow us to know these cells are recently active.

So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cells for that memory will also have this switch installed.

SR: So here is what the hippocampus looks like after forming a fear memory, for example.

The sea of blue that you see here are densely packed brain cells, but the green brain cells, the green brain cells are the ones that are holding on to a specific fear memory.

You're actually looking at the cross-section of a memory right now.

So it will not allow us to control a memory in real time.

SR: So electricity is pretty fast, but we probably wouldn't be able to target it to just the specific cells that hold onto a memory, and we'd probably fry the brain.

So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cell for that particular memory will also have this light-sensitive switch installed in it so that we can control these cells by the flipping of a laser just like this one you see.

What we can do is we can take our mice and then we can put them in a box that looks exactly like this box here, and then we can give them a very mild foot shock so that they form a fear memory of this box.

Now with our system, the cells that are active in the hippocampus in the making of this memory, only those cells will now contain channelrhodopsin.

But what if we put the mouse in this new box but at the same time, we activate the fear memory using lasers just like we did before?

Are we going to bring back the fear memory for the first box into this completely new environment?

We were looking at this mouse here trying to activate a memory for the first time using our technique.

So indeed, it looks like we are able to bring back the fear memory for the first box in this completely new environment.

But this also reminds us that, although we are still working with mice, it's probably a good idea to start thinking and discussing about the possible ethical ramifications of memory control.

So we reasoned that now that we can reactivate a memory, what if we do so but then begin to tinker with that memory?

Could we possibly even turn it into a false memory?

XL: So all memory is sophisticated and dynamic, but if just for simplicity, let's imagine memory as a movie clip.

Turned out that all we need to do is basically reactivate a memory using lasers just like we did before, but at the same time, if we present new information and allow this new information to incorporate into this old memory, this will change the memory.

Rather than finding a fear memory in the brain, we can start by taking our animals, and let's say we put them in a blue box like this blue box here and we find the brain cells that represent that blue box and we trick them to respond to pulses of light exactly like we had said before.

We can shoot light into the brain to reactivate the memory of the blue box.

So what would happen here if, while the animal is recalling the memory of the blue box, we gave it a couple of mild foot shocks?

So here we're trying to artificially make an association between the memory of the blue box and the foot shocks themselves.

Again, we had just reactivated the memory of the blue box while the animal got a couple of mild foot shocks, and now the animal suddenly freezes.

So it formed a false memory, because it's falsely fearing an environment where, technically speaking, nothing bad actually happened to it.

In fact, we also have a light-controlled "off" switch, and it's very easy to imagine that by installing this light-controlled "off" switch, we can also turn off a memory, any time, anywhere.

SR: And for me personally, I see a world where we can reactivate any kind of memory that we'd like.

XL: Nowadays, people in the lab and people in other groups all over the world are using similar methods to activate or edit memories, whether that's old or new, positive or negative, all sorts of memories so that we can understand how memory works.

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