12/31/2023 0 Comments Lack of infantile amnesiaSome people also keep them as pets.Developmental amnesia is caused by a lack of oxygen reaching the brain. Apparently they can be handy for science. In case you were wondering what a degu looks like, here's a degu. So pinning down the exact mechanism in humans will be much more difficult. The trouble is that you can't go around cutting open people's brains to count how many new neurons they have like you can with mice. But given the similarity of mammalian brains, it is reasonable to think that something similar is occurring in humans. They were done in rodents - so, strictly speaking, they tell us about these rodents. Of course, there's a huge caveat here: these experiments were not performed in people. You want to get rid of all the junk, and you want to remember the important features and important events." "You need to increase the signal to noise ratio. There's finite capacity," says Paul Frankland, a neurobiologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto who led the study. "So there is a tradeoff there, preserving the older memories may come at the cost of making new ones."įREUD'S IDEA ABOUT REPRESSED MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD TRAUMA ISN'T MAINSTREAM ANYMOREĪnd a lack of memories - both in childhood and adulthood - isn't necessarily a bad thing. "Some kind of forgetting is important for memory. "Perhaps the forgetting seen here is actually due to the increased ability to learn new things," he says. However, Kheirbek points out that it might not be the new neurons themselves but the new learning that new neurons allow that makes the difference. "I think provides a very compelling mechanism for why we don't remember infantile memories," says Mazen Kheirbek, who studies the birth of new brain cells at Columbia University. (Freud thought that infantile amnesia helped repress memories of childhood trauma, but that's not really mainstream anymore.) The Science paper doesn't necessarily rule these ideas out - it might even complement them. There have many hypotheses about infantile amnesia in the psychological literature over the years, such as the notion that it stems from young children's lack of language skills or emotional development. Jason Snyder Infantile amnesia isn't such a bad thing Newly generated neurons (white) in the hippocampus region of the brain. But when researchers artificially increased the rates of neurogenesis in young guinea pigs and degu, they couldn't hold on to memories as well. And, it turns out, those species don't normally experience infantile amnesia. Young guinea pigs and degus have lower rates of neurogenesis. They also tested out two other species of rodents that are more mature than mice at birth: the guinea pig and a Chilean animal called a degu (scroll down for an adorable picture). The scientists then showed that they were able to stop infantile amnesia: decreasing the birth of new neurons in young mice made those mice remember things better. By contrast, slowing down the rate of neurogenesis made mice better able to remember things.ĭECREASING THE BIRTH OF NEW NEURONS IN YOUNG MICE MADE THEM REMEMBER BETTER Of mice and memoriesīoosting neurogenesis in adult mice by giving them a running wheel for several weeks or using drugs caused those mice to remember things less well. Then they tweaked the animals' rates of neurogenesis and saw what happened to those memories later on. Here's how scientists hit on this finding: First, they instilled memories in various animals - creating an association between a place and a mild electric shock. These new neurons could be crowding out the old circuits that hold memories. According to the Science paper, the extremely high rates of neurogenesis seen in very young brains can actually increase forgetfulness. Most of the time, neurogenesis leads to better learning and improved memory. And this process is particularly active in the hippocampus, which deals with memories and learning. Mammals' brains make new cells throughout life - a process called neurogenesis - but babies of some species, including humans, produce new neurons at a much higher rate. The paper, which studied rodents, concludes that the new cells that are constantly being formed in very young brains may be messing up the circuits that hold memories. And a new paper in the journal Science provides the first evidence of a physical mechanism that might explain this odd phenomenon. These questions have puzzled people for ages. THE NEW BRAIN CELLS OF YOUNG ANIMALS MAY BE MESSING UP THEIR MEMORIES Why don't you remember being a baby? How come you barely remember being a young child? How come a three-year-old can remember things that happened - but will then have no memories of that day a few years later?
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