Jessica Hamzelou explains in NewScientist (14 April 2018) that scientists have discovered experiences change gene expression – in your brain:
The brain seems to store memories in new connections between neurons. To do this, the neurons need to make new proteins – a process that is thought to be controlled by hundreds of genes.
While investigating how this works, Ami Citri at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his colleagues discovered that particular experiences – be it an electric shock or a hit of cocaine – elicit different changes in gene activity in the brains of mice.
These mice were given a variety of positive or negative experiences, such as electric shocks to their feet, a sugar treat, a dose of a chemical that makes them feel ill or cocaine. An hour later, they were euthanised and the team looked at which genes were being expressed in seven areas of the brain that are involved in memory, including the hippocampus and amygdala.
Citri was surprised to find that all of the mice given cocaine, for example, showed the same general pattern of gene activity. The patterns were so clear that the team could guess what experience a mouse had been through with over 90 per cent accuracy just by analysing the levels of activity of different genes in their brains (eLife, doi.org/cm6w).
The whole euthanization thing is a bit of a spoiler, of course, for would-be scientific mind-readers. It’s a fascinating first glimpse into the mechanics of storing memories. The next – BIG – step is to predict how a specific experience will modify the brain, right? At the moment, it’s a matter of noting correlations a posteriori. If you can predict, without that specific correlation being available, how some arbitrary experience will affect the brains of a normal person, then you’re really cooking.
That should take, oh, several centuries to accomplish.
And then that atypical persons brain should also be fascinating. Oooops, subject’s dead. Damn, we should have developed the tricorder, first…
