To be afraid, not to be afraid anymore, to be afraid again. Researchers at the San Diego School of Medicine in the United States managed to play with the rats’ memories by stimulating their nerves. In a study published by the journal Nature, they explain that their prowess represents a new hope in the field of research against Alzheimer’s disease.
American scientists implanted an optical fiber in a region of the brain of the rats used for the experiment.
Thanks to the light generated by the fiber, they were able to manipulate the synapses, and therefore the contact between two neurons. By causing an electric shock in the rat’s foot, the rat associated the fear of the shock with the pulse of light. But when synapses were stimulated at a low frequency, memories were weakened, the researchers note. A high frequency pulse caused the opposite effect: the rats got scared.
People with Alzheimer’s suffer from an accumulation of beta-amyloid in their brain, which causes weakened synapse connections, as do low frequencies. “As our work shows that we can reverse the process that weakens synapses, we could potentially counter some of the effects of beta-amyloid in Alzheimer’s patients,” hopes Roberto Malinow, professor of neuroscience and one of the authors of the study, cited by the Huffington Post.