MIT scientists implant a false memory into a mouse’s brain

Courtesy of Xu Liu and Steve Ramirez -  The hippocampus of a mouse brain, after the making of a memory. The cells glowing in red contain the memory of a particular environment and have been genetically tricked to be capable of being turned on with just brief pulses of light

 Sometime soon, a lab mouse could wake up thinking he had snuggled up to a girl mouse the night before. But he hadn’t. The memory would be fake.  Scientists have successfully implanted a false memory into a mouse’s brain — a seemingly far-fetched idea reminiscent of a science fiction film. 
 
“If mice had Hollywood, this would be ‘Inception’ for them,” said one of the lead researchers, MIT neuroscientist Steve Ramirez, whose study was published online Thursday in the journal Science.

Ramirez and his colleagues tagged brain cells associated with a specific memory and then tweaked that memory to make the mouse believe something had happened when it hadn’t.  Although implanting a memory won’t happen anytime soon in people, in principle, it should be possible to isolate a human memory and activate it at will, scientists said. 

“We would have every reason to expect this would happen in humans exactly as it happened in mice,” said Michael J. Kahana, who was not involved in the study but is director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Computational Memory Lab.

Researchers said the ability to implant a false memory was a scientific milestone; Kahana called it a “technical tour de force.” The study’s authors said this type of research could one day help treat some emotional problems, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, which involves the intrusion 

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