Erasing memory, one neuron at a time

And now we get to the third paper I could present for Journal Club. This one’s on something that Sci doesn’t really know as much about. This makes it both more exciting, and slightly more scary. But the science is elegant and the results are amazing. So it might very well be worth it.
Have you ever thought of what happens when you commit something to memory? If you’re like Sci, you think of filing it away in little filing cabinets in your brain. But the way that memory encoding is actually done is still something of a mystery. We know that groups of neurons work together to serve as a physical representation of memory, otherwise known as the “memory trace”. Groups of neurons acting together have been seen correlated with memories being encoded, and with the expression of memories. But we still don’t know whether these disparate groups of neurons “are” memory, whether they are essential for a memory trace.
This group of researchers decided to find out whether specifically activated neurons were essential for memory learning and expression. As you might imagine, what they had to do was pretty insanely complicated, but what they found makes it very well worth it. Seriously. Complicated. My print-out of the paper (I had to print it out because I couldn’t just read it, had to make notes), is COVERED IN INK. But I think I’ve got it, and they’ve got an awesome message. Now to pass it on!
Han, et al. “Selective erasure of a fear memory” Science, 2009.