Scientists implant false memories in mice

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found a way to fool mice into remembering an electric shock where none actually existed.

By Joel Shurkin,?Inside Science News Service contributor / July 26, 2013

Researchers have created fake memories in mice indistinguishable from the mice's true recollections, an accomplishment that has bearings on much confidence we should have in our own memories.

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?Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today?s events,? said Albert Einstein. ?It is also deceptive because it is frequently wrong, sometimes dangerously so.

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Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed the ability to implant mice with false memories. The memories can be easily induced and are just as strong as real memories, physiological proof of something psychologists and lawyers have known for years.

The findings are a serious matter. According to the?Innocence Project, eyewitness testimony played a role in 75 percent of guilty verdicts eventually overturned by DNA testing after people spent years in prison. Some prisoners may even have been executed due to false eyewitness testimony. It was not because the witnesses were lying. They were just wrong, said Susumu Tonegawa, a molecular biologist and the lead author in the MIT study.

In the longest criminal trial in American history, the McMartin family, who operated a preschool in California, was charged with multiple incidents of child abuse. After seven years and $15 million in prosecution expenses, some charges were dropped and the defendants were acquitted of others when it became clear some of the accusations were based on false memories, some possibly planted by childrens? therapists.

There is now a False Memory Syndrome in scientific literature and a False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

Last year, Tonegawa and his team published a study in?Nature?showing how false memories could be implanted in mice. They first put mice in a chamber -- the scientists called it the Red Room -- and let the animals roam around exploring so they could build up a contextual memory of it.

After a while, they gave the mice mild electric shocks to their feet and a blue light flashed in their brains delivered by a fiber-optic cable, implanting the memory that the Red Room was a dangerous place.

The next day researchers put the mice in an entirely different chamber ? the Black Room ? and let them explore peacefully. The mice were not afraid until the light flashed. The mice froze again although they were not in the chamber where they had received a shock. Why?

Memory is largely in the hippocampus, Tonegawa said, in a section called the dentate gyrus. Tonegawa, Steve Ramirez, a graduate student, and their colleagues identified the neurons there that were associated with experiential learning.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/AvCd7xcGXdg/Scientists-implant-false-memories-in-mice

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