Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus

Can You Trust Your Memory? Being highly imaginative animals, humans constantly recall past experiences. These internally generated stimuli sometimes get associated with concurrent external stimuli, which can lead to the formation of false memories. Ramirez et al. (p. 387; see the cover) identified a population of cells in the dentate gyrus of the mouse hippocampus that encoded a particular context and were able to generate a false memory and study its neural and behavioral interactions with true memories. Optogenetic reactivation of memory engram–bearing cells was not only sufficient for the behavioral recall of that memory, but could also serve as a conditioned stimulus for the formation of an associative memory. Associations can be artificially created through reactivation of memory engrams in mouse dentate gyrus granule cells. Memories can be unreliable. We created a false memory in mice by optogenetically manipulating memory engram–bearing cells in the hippocampus. Dentate gyrus (DG) or CA1 neurons activated by exposure to a particular context were labeled with channelrhodopsin-2. These neurons were later optically reactivated during fear conditioning in a different context. The DG experimental group showed increased freezing in the original context, in which a foot shock was never delivered. The recall of this false memory was context-specific, activated similar downstream regions engaged during natural fear memory recall, and was also capable of driving an active fear response. Our data demonstrate that it is possible to generate an internally represented and behaviorally expressed fear memory via artificial means.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  Science

• Publication date

  2013-07-26

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1126/science.1239073PMID 23888038
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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