New Ways to Enhance Memory in People with Traumatic Brain Injury: Research-Health

In a new study, researchers focus on brain encoding and advocate new ways to enhance memory in people suffering from traumatic brain injury, including: Alzheimer..

Research results published in PNAS and Science show how the brain works while encoding time and place into memory. The findings may not only add to the body of basic research on memory, but may ultimately provide the basis for new therapies to combat amnesia due to major illnesses.

A study conducted about 10 years ago discovered a group of neurons known as “time cells” in rats. Researchers have found that cells appear to be important and play a unique role in recording events. This correctly marked the order of what happens in episodic memory.

Bradley Lega, MD, associate professor of neurosurgery at UTSW and senior author of PNAS research, explains that cells in the hippocampus of the brain exhibited characteristic activity patterns that animals code while remembering events. did. “By firing in a reproducible order, the brain can organize when events occur. The timing of those firings is a process known as precession, 5Hz, called theta vibration. It is controlled by the brain waves of the body, “says Lega.

Lega and his colleagues recruit volunteers from the epilepsy monitoring unit of the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute in UT Southwestern, and humans also have time cells using memory tasks that demand time-related information. I investigated whether it was.

For the study, epilepsy patients were allowed to stay for several days before surgery to remove the damaged part of the brain that caused the seizures. Lega said the electrodes implanted in the brains of these patients helped surgeons find valuable information about the inner workings of the brain.

A “free recall” task, which included reading a 12-word list for 30 seconds, was done to distract from the list rehearsal after a short math problem and recall as many words as possible from the list. It was practiced in the patient. Next 30 seconds. This task required each word to be associated with a time segment. This allowed Lega and his team to look for a time cell.

What the team found was exciting and extraordinary. In addition to identifying a robust population of time cells, firing these cells predicted how well an individual could link words in time (a phenomenon called time clustering). Finally, these cells appeared to exhibit phase progression in humans, as expected.

According to Lega, “for years, scientists have proposed that time cells are like glue that holds memories of events in our lives. We specifically support the idea in an elegant way. “

In the second study, Dr. Brad Pfeiffer, an assistant professor of neuroscience, led a team investigating place cells, a population of both animal and human hippocampal cells that record where the event occurred.

According to researchers, place cells are further organized into “mini-sequences” while the rat is actively exploring the environment, representing a virtual sweep of the location in front of the rat. These radar-like sweeps occur about 8-10 times per second and are thought to be the brain’s mechanism for predicting immediate events and outcomes.

These “reverse regeneration” events were known to be important for memory formation, but it was unclear how the hippocampus could generate such sequences. With considerable work, the experience has shown that it needs to strengthen the “look-ahead” sequence, but weaken the reverse play event.

To determine how these posterior and anterior memories work together, Pfeiffer and his colleagues placed electrodes on the hippocampus of the rat and placed two different locations, a square arena and a long straight track. We explored and analyzed and confirmed the activity of animal place cells. How it corresponded to the location.

When the rat wandered in space, a specific neuron fired and encoded information about its location. The same neurons fired in the same order that the rat followed its path, and periodically reversed as they completed different sections of the journey. However, looking closer at the data, researchers found that as rats moved through space, neurons exhibited not only anterior predictive minisequences, but also posterior retrospective minisequences. The forward and reverse sequences alternate with each other, and each takes only a few tens of milliseconds to complete.

“While these animals were moving forward, their brains were constantly switching between predicting what would happen next and remembering what happened now. All for a moment. Within the time frame, “Pfeiffer said.

In theory, Pfeiffer said it might be possible to hijack the system so that the brain can more faithfully remember where the event happened. Similarly, Lega added that stimulation techniques could ultimately mimic the exact pattern of time cells and help people remember the temporal sequence of events more accurately.

(This story is published from the news agency feed without changing the text.)

Follow more stories above Facebook And twitter