Links for Keyword: Learning & Memory

Follow us on Facebook or subscribe to our mailing list, to receive news updates. Learn more.


Links 1 - 20 of 1308

By Michael S. Rosenwald In early February, Vishvaa Rajakumar, a 20-year-old Indian college student, won the Memory League World Championship, an online competition pitting people against one another with challenges like memorizing the order of 80 random numbers faster than most people can tie a shoelace. The renowned neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire, who died in January, studied mental athletes like Mr. Rajakumar and found that many of them used the ancient Roman “method of loci,” a memorization trick also known as the “memory palace.” The technique takes several forms, but it generally involves visualizing a large house and assigning memories to rooms. Mentally walking through the house fires up the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped engine of memory deep in the brain that consumed Dr. Maguire’s career. We asked Mr. Rajakumar about his strategies of memorization. His answers, lightly edited and condensed for clarity, are below. Q. How do you prepare for the Memory League World Championship? Hydration is very important because it helps your brain. When you memorize things, you usually sub-vocalize, and it helps to have a clear throat. Let’s say you’re reading a book. You’re not reading it out loud, but you are vocalizing within yourself. If you don’t drink a lot of water, your speed will be a bit low. If you drink a lot of water, it will be more and more clear and you can read it faster. Q. What does your memory palace look like? Let’s say my first location is my room where I sleep. My second location is the kitchen. And the third location is my hall. The fourth location is my veranda. Another location is my bathroom. Let’s say I am memorizing a list of words. Let’s say 10 words. What I do is, I take a pair of words, make a story out of them and place them in a location. And I take the next two words. I make a story out of them. I place them in the second location. The memory palace will help you to remember the sequence. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning; Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 29673 - Posted: 02.15.2025

By Angie Voyles Askham Identifying what a particular neuromodulator does in the brain—let alone how such molecules interact—has vexed researchers for decades. Dopamine agonists increase reward-seeking, whereas serotonin agonists decrease it, for example, suggesting that the two neuromodulators act in opposition. And yet, neurons in the brain’s limbic regions release both chemicals in response to a reward (and also to a punishment), albeit on different timescales, electrophysiological recordings have revealed, pointing to a complementary relationship. This dual response suggests that the interplay between dopamine and serotonin may be important for learning. But no tools existed to simultaneously manipulate the neuromodulators and test their respective roles in a particular area of the brain—at least, not until now—says Robert Malenka, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. As it turns out, serotonin and dopamine join forces in the nucleus accumbens during reinforcement learning, according to a new study Malenka led, yet they act in opposition: dopamine as a gas pedal and serotonin as a brake on signaling that a stimulus is rewarding. The mice he and his colleagues studied learned faster and performed more reliably when the team optogenetically pressed on the animals’ dopamine “gas” as they simultaneously eased off the serotonin “brake.” “It adds a very rich and beguiling picture of the interaction between dopamine and serotonin,” says Peter Dayan, director of computational neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. In 2002, Dayan proposed a different framework for how dopamine and serotonin might work in opposition, but he was not involved in the new study. The new work “partially recapitulates” that 2002 proposal, Dayan adds, “but also poses many more questions.” © 2025 Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29672 - Posted: 02.15.2025

By Michael S. Rosenwald Eleanor Maguire, a cognitive neuroscientist whose research on the human hippocampus — especially those belonging to London taxi drivers — transformed the understanding of memory, revealing that a key structure in the brain can be strengthened like a muscle, died on Jan. 4 in London. She was 54. Her death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by Cathy Price, her colleague at the U.C.L. Queen Square Institute of Neurology. Dr. Maguire was diagnosed with spinal cancer in 2022 and had recently developed pneumonia. Working for 30 years in a small, tight-knit lab, Dr. Maguire obsessed over the hippocampus — a seahorse-shaped engine of memory deep in the brain — like a meticulous, relentless detective trying to solve a cold case. An early pioneer of using functional magnetic resonance imaging (f.M.R.I.) on living subjects, Dr. Maguire was able to look inside human brains as they processed information. Her studies revealed that the hippocampus can grow, and that memory is not a replay of the past but rather an active reconstructive process that shapes how people imagine the future. “She was absolutely one of the leading researchers of her generation in the world on memory,” Chris Frith, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at University College London, said in an interview. “She changed our understanding of memory, and I think she also gave us important new ways of studying it.” In 1995, while she was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Frith’s lab, she was watching television one evening when she stumbled on “The Knowledge,” a quirky film about prospective London taxi drivers memorizing the city’s 25,000 streets to prepare for a three-year-long series of licensing tests. Dr. Maguire, who said she rarely drove because she feared never arriving at her destination, was mesmerized. “I am absolutely appalling at finding my way around,” she once told The Daily Telegraph. “I wondered, ‘How are some people so bloody good and I am so terrible?’” In the first of a series of studies, Dr. Maguire and her colleagues scanned the brains of taxi drivers while quizzing them about the shortest routes between various destinations in London. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29671 - Posted: 02.15.2025

By Yasemin Saplakoglu Imagine you’re on a first date, sipping a martini at a bar. You eat an olive and patiently listen to your date tell you about his job at a bank. Your brain is processing this scene, in part, by breaking it down into concepts. Bar. Date. Martini. Olive. Bank. Deep in your brain, neurons known as concept cells are firing. You might have concept cells that fire for martinis but not for olives. Or ones that fire for bars — perhaps even that specific bar, if you’ve been there before. The idea of a “bank” also has its own set of concept cells, maybe millions of them. And there, in that dimly lit bar, you’re starting to form concept cells for your date, whether you like him or not. Those cells will fire when something reminds you of him. Concept neurons fire for their concept no matter how it is presented: in real life or a photo, in text or speech, on television or in a podcast. “It’s more abstract, really different from what you’re seeing,” said Elizabeth Buffalo (opens a new tab), a neuroscientist at the University of Washington. For decades, neuroscientists mocked the idea that the brain could have such intense selectivity, down to the level of an individual neuron: How could there be one or more neurons for each of the seemingly countless concepts we engage with over a lifetime? “It’s inefficient. It’s not economic,” people broadly agreed, according to the neurobiologist Florian Mormann (opens a new tab) at the University of Bonn. But when researchers identified concept cells in the early 2000s, the laughter started to fade. Over the past 20 years, they have established that concept cells not only exist but are critical to the way the brain abstracts and stores information. New studies, including one recently published in Nature Communications, have suggested that they may be central to how we form and retrieve memory. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning; Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 29639 - Posted: 01.22.2025

Rachael Elward Lauren Ford Severance, which imagines a world where a person’s work and personal lives are surgically separated, will soon return to Apple TV+ for a second season. While the concept of this gripping piece of science fiction is far-fetched, it touches on some interesting neuroscience. Can a person’s mind really be surgically split in two? Remarkably, “split-brain” patients have existed since the 1940s. To control epilepsy symptoms, these patients underwent a surgery to separate the left and right hemispheres. Similar surgeries still happen today. Later research on this type of surgery showed that the separated hemispheres of split-brain patients could process information independently. This raises the uncomfortable possibility that the procedure creates two separate minds living in one brain. In season one of Severance, Helly R (Britt Lower) experienced a conflict between her “innie” (the side of her mind that remembered her work life) and her “outie” (the side outside of work). Similarly, there is evidence of a conflict between the two hemispheres of real split-brain patients. When speaking with split-brain patients, you are usually communicating with the left hemisphere of the brain, which controls speech. However, some patients can communicate from their right hemisphere by writing, for example, or arranging Scrabble letters. A young patient was asked what job he would like in the future. His left hemisphere chose an office job making technical drawings. His right hemisphere, however, arranged letters to spell “automobile racer”. Split brain patients have also reported “alien hand syndrome”, where one of their hands is perceived to be moving of its own volition. These observations suggest that two separate conscious “people” may coexist in one brain and may have conflicting goals. In Severance, however, both the innie and the outie have access to speech. This is one indicator that the fictional “severance procedure” must involve a more complex separation of the brain’s networks. © 2010–2025, The Conversation US, Inc.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning; Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 29635 - Posted: 01.18.2025

By Anna Victoria Molofsky Twenty years ago, a remarkable discovery upended our understanding of the range of elements that can shape neuronal function: A team in Europe demonstrated that enzymatic digestion of the extracellular matrix (ECM)—a latticework of proteins that surrounds all brain cells—could restore plasticity to the visual cortex even after the region’s “critical period” had ended. Other studies followed, showing that ECM digestion could also alter learning in the hippocampus and other brain circuits. These observations established that proteins outside neurons can control synaptic plasticity. We now know that up to 20 percent of the brain is extracellular space, filled with hundreds of ECM proteins—a “matrisome” that plays multiple roles, including modulating synaptic function and myelin formation. ECM genes in the human brain are different than those in other species, suggesting that the proteins they encode could be part of what makes our brains unique and keeps them healthy. In a large population study, posted as a preprint on bioRxiv last year, that examined blood protein biomarkers of organ aging, for example, the presence of ECM proteins was most highly correlated with a youthful brain. Matrisome proteins are also dysregulated in astrocytes from people at high risk for Alzheimer’s disease, another study showed. Despite the influence of these proteins and the ongoing work of a few dedicated researchers, however, the ECM field has not caught on. I would challenge a room full of neuroscientists to name one protein in the extracellular matrix. To this day, the only ECM components most neuroscientists have heard of are “perineuronal nets”—structures that play an important role in stabilizing synapses but make up just a tiny fraction of the matrisome. A respectable scientific journal, covering its own paper that identified a critical impact of ECM, called it “brain goop.” © 2025 Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29633 - Posted: 01.18.2025

By Laura Sanders Recovery from PTSD comes with key changes in the brain’s memory system, a new study finds. These differences were found in the brains of 19 people who developed post-traumatic stress disorder after the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris — and then recovered over the following years. The results, published January 8 in Science Advances, point to the complexity of PTSD, but also to ways that brains can reshape themselves as they recover. With memory tasks and brain scans, the study provides a cohesive look at the recovering brain, says cognitive neuroscientist Vishnu Murty of the University of Oregon in Eugene. “It’s pulled together a lot of pieces that were floating around in the field.” On the night of November 13, 2015, terrorists attacked a crowded stadium, a theater and restaurants in Paris. In the years after, PTSD researchers were able to study some of the people who endured that trauma. Just over half the 100 people who volunteered for the study had PTSD initially. Of those, 34 still had the disorder two to three years later; 19 had recovered by two to three years. People who developed PTSD showed differences in how their brains handled intrusive memories, laboratory-based tests of memory revealed. Participants learned pairs of random words and pictures — a box of tissues with the word “work,” for example. PTSD involves pairs of associated stimuli too, though in much more complicated ways. A certain smell or sound, for instance, can be linked with the memory of trauma. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29622 - Posted: 01.11.2025

By McKenzie Prillaman A peek into living tissue from human hippocampi, a brain region crucial for memory and learning, revealed relatively few cell-to-cell connections for the vast number of nerve cells. But signals sent via those sparse connections proved extremely reliable and precise, researchers report December 11 in Cell. One seahorse-shaped hippocampus sits deep within each hemisphere of the mammalian brain. In each hippocampus’s CA3 area, humans have about 1.7 million nerve cells called pyramidal cells. This subregion is thought to be the most internally connected part of the brain in mammals. But much information about nerve cells in this structure has come from studies in mice, which have only 110,000 pyramidal cells in each CA3 subregion. Previously discovered differences between mouse and human hippocampi hinted that animals with more nerve cells may have fewer connections — or synapses — between them, says cellular neuroscientist Peter Jonas of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in Klosterneuburg. To see if this held true, he and his colleagues examined tissue taken with consent from eight patients who underwent brain surgery to treat epilepsy. Recording electrical activity from human pyramidal cells in the CA3 area suggested that about 10 synapses existed for every 800 cell pairs tested. In mice, that concentration roughly tripled. Despite the relatively scant nerve cell connections in humans, those cells showed steady and robust activity when sending signals to one another — unlike mouse pyramidal cells. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning; Chapter 2: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Link ID: 29616 - Posted: 01.08.2025

By Traci Watson New clues have emerged in the mystery of how the brain avoids ‘catastrophic forgetting’ — the distortion and overwriting of previously established memories when new ones are created. A research team has found that, at least in mice, the brain processes new and old memories in separate phases of sleep, which might prevent mixing between the two. Assuming that the finding is confirmed in other animals, “I put all my money that this segregation will also occur in humans”, says György Buzsáki, a systems neuroscientist at New York University in New York City. That’s because memory is an evolutionarily ancient system, says Buzsáki, who was not part of the research team but once supervised the work of some of its members. The work was published on Wednesday in Nature1. Scientists have long known that, during sleep, the brain ‘replays’ recent experiences: the same neurons involved in an experience fire in the same order. This mechanism helps to solidify the experience as a memory and prepare it for long-term storage. To study brain function during sleep, the research team exploited a quirk of mice: their eyes are partially open during some stages of slumber. The team monitored one eye in each mouse as it slept. During a deep phase of sleep, the researchers observed the pupils shrink and then return to their original, larger size repeatedly, with each cycle lasting roughly one minute. Neuron recordings showed that most of the brain’s replay of experiences took place when the animals’ pupils were small. That led the scientists to wonder whether pupil size and memory processing are linked. To find out, they enlisted a technique called optogenetics, which uses light to either trigger or suppress the electrical activity of genetically engineered neurons in the brain. First, they trained engineered mice to find a sweet treat hidden on a platform. Immediately after these lessons, as the mice slept, the authors used optogenetics to reduce bursts of neuronal firing that have been linked to replay. They did so during both the small-pupil and large-pupil stages of sleep. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29615 - Posted: 01.04.2025

By Andrea Tamayo Kidney cells can make memories too. At least, in a metaphorical sense. Neurons have historically been the cell most associated with memory. But far outside the brain, kidney cells can also store information and recognize patterns in a similar way to neurons, researchers report November 7 in Nature Communications. “We’re not saying that this kind of memory helps you learn trigonometry or remember how to ride a bike or stores your childhood memories,” says Nikolay Kukushkin, a neuroscientist at New York University. “This research adds to the idea of memory; it doesn’t challenge the existing conceptions of memory in the brain.” In experiments, the kidney cells showed signs of what’s called a “massed-space effect.” This well-known feature of how memory works in the brain facilitates storing information in small chunks over time, rather than a big chunk at once. Outside the brain, cells of all types need to keep track of stuff. One way they do that is through a protein central to memory processing, called CREB. It, and other molecular components of memory, are found in neurons and nonneuronal cells. While the cells have similar parts, the researchers weren’t sure if the parts worked the same way. In neurons, when a chemical signal passes through, the cell starts producing CREB. The protein then turns on more genes that further change the cell, kick-starting the molecular memory machine (SN: 2/3/04). Kukushkin and colleagues set out to determine whether CREB in nonneuronal cells responds to incoming signals the same way. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29576 - Posted: 11.27.2024

By Claudia López Lloreda Fear memories serve a purpose: A mouse in the wild learns to fear the sound of footsteps, which helps it avoid predators. But in certain situations, those fear memories can also tinge neutral memories with fear, resulting in maladaptive behavior. A mouse or person, for instance, may learn to fear stimuli that should presumably be safe. This shift can occur when an existing fear memory broadens—either by recruiting inappropriate neurons into the cell ensemble that contains it or by linking up to a previously neutral memory, according to two new studies in mice, one published today and another last week. Memories are embodied in the brain through sparse ensembles of neurons, called engrams, that activate when an animal forms a new memory or recalls it later. These ensembles were thought to be “stable and permanent,” says Denise Cai, associate professor of neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who led one of the studies. But the new findings reveal how, during times of fear and stress, memories can become malleable, either as they are brought back online or as the neurons that encode them expand. There is “this really powerful ability of stress to look back and change memories for neutral experiences that have come before by pulling them into the same neural representation or by exciting them more during offline periods,” says Elizabeth Goldfarb, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, who was not involved in the studies. That challenges the previous dogma, Cai says. “We’ve learned that these memory ensembles are actually quite dynamic.” © 2024 Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29563 - Posted: 11.16.2024

By Angie Voyles Askham Engrams, the physical circuits of individual memories, consist of more than just neurons, according to a new study published today in Nature. Astrocytes, too, shape how some memories are stored and retrieved, the work shows. The results represent “a fundamental change” in how the neuroscience field should think about indexing memories, says lead researcher Benjamin Deneen, professor of neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine. “We need to reconsider the cellular, physical basis of how we store memories.” When mice form a new memory, a specific set of neurons becomes active and expresses the immediate early gene c-FOS, past work has found. Reactivating that ensemble of neurons, the engram, causes the mice to recall that memory. Interactions between neurons and astrocytes are critical for the formation of long-term memory, according to a spatial transcriptomics study from February, and both astrocytes and oligodendrocytes are involved in memory formation, other work has shown. Yet engram studies have largely ignored the activity of non-neuronal cells, says Sheena Josselyn, senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children, who was not involved in the new study. But astrocytes are also active alongside neurons as memories are formed and recalled, and disrupting the star-shaped cells’ function interferes with these processes, the new work reveals. The study does not dethrone neurons as the lead engram stars, according to Josselyn. “It really shows that, yes, neurons are important. But there are also other players that we’re just beginning to understand the importance of,” she says. “It’ll help broaden our focus.” © 2024 Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29558 - Posted: 11.13.2024

By Sara Reardon Elephants love showering to cool off, and most do so by sucking water into their trunks and spitting it over their bodies. But an elderly pachyderm named Mary has perfected the technique by using a hose as a showerhead, much in the way humans do. The behavior is a remarkable example of sophisticated tool use in the animal kingdom. But the story doesn’t end there. Mary’s long, luxurious baths have drawn so much attention that an envious elephant at the Berlin Zoo has figured out how to shut the water off on her supersoaking rival—a type of sabotage rarely seen among animals. Both behaviors, reported today in Current Biology, further cement elephants as complex thinkers, says Lucy Bates, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Portsmouth not involved in the study. The work, she says, “suggests problem solving or even ‘insight.’” Many elephants enjoy playing with hoses, probably because they remind them of trunks, says Michael Brecht, a computational neuroscientist at Humboldt University of Berlin. But Mary takes the activity to another level. Using her trunk, the 54-year-old Asian elephant (Elephas maximus)—a senior citizen, given the average captive life span of her species of 48 years—holds a hose over her head and waves it back and forth. She also changes her grip on the hose to spray different parts of her body and swings it like a lasso to throw water over her back. Brecht’s graduate student, Lena Kaufmann, noticed Mary’s hose use while studying other types of behavior in the zoo’s elephants; the zookeepers told her Mary did this frequently. So Kaufman and her colleagues started to record the showering on video over the course of a year, testing how Mary reacted to changes in the setup.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29547 - Posted: 11.09.2024

By Calli McMurray Daniel Heinz clicked through each folder in the file drive, searching for the answers that had evaded him and his lab mates for years. Heinz, a graduate student in Brenda Bloodgood’s lab at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), was working on a Ph.D. project, part of which built on the work of a postdoctoral researcher who had left the lab and started his own a few years prior. The former postdoc studied how various types of electrical activity in the mouse hippocampus induce a gene called NPAS4 in different ways. One of his discoveries was that, in some situations, NPAS4 was induced in the far-reaching dendrites of neurons. The postdoc’s work resulted in a paper in Cell, landed him more than $1.4 million in grants and an assistant professor position at the University of Utah, and spawned several follow-up projects in the lab. In other words, it was a slam dunk. But no one else in the lab—including Heinz—could replicate the NPAS4 data. Other lab members always had a technical explanation for why the replication experiments failed, so for years the problem was passed from one trainee to another. Which explains why, on this day in early April 2023, Heinz was poking around the postdoc’s raw data. What he eventually found would lead to a retraction, a resignation and a reckoning, but in the moment, Heinz says, he was not thinking about any of those possibilities. In fact, he had told no one he was doing this. He just wanted to figure out why his experiments weren’t working. To visualize the location of NPAS4, the lab used immunohistochemistry, which tags a gene product with a tailored fluorescent antibody. Any part of the cell that expresses the gene should glow. In his replication attempts, Heinz says he struggled to see any expression, and when he saw indications of it, the signal was faint and noisy. So he wanted to compare his own images to the postdoc’s raw results rather than the processed images included in the 2019 Cell paper. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29504 - Posted: 10.05.2024

By Rebecca Dzombak Birds can be picky building their nests. They experiment with materials, waffle over which twig to use, take them apart and start again. It’s a complex, fiddly process that can seem to reflect careful thought. “It’s so fascinating,” Maria Tello-Ramos, a behavioral ecologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said. “But it hasn’t been studied much at all.” New research led by Dr. Tello-Ramos, published on Thursday in the journal Science, provides the first evidence that groups of birds that build their homes together learn to follow consistent architectural styles, distinct from groups just a few dozen feet away. The finding upends longstanding assumptions that nest building is an innate behavior based on the birds’ environment and adds to a growing list of behaviors that make up bird culture. As important for survival as nest building is, scientists know relatively little about it. Most of what is known about bird nests has come from studying their role in reproductive success, focusing on their usefulness in protecting birds and eggs from cold, wind and predators. “The focus has been on the structure, not the behavior that built it,” Dr. Tello-Ramos said. She said she found that surprising because nest building is one of the rare behaviors that has a tangible product, something that can be measured and provide insight into why birds behave the way they do. Part of the reason nest-building behaviors haven’t been researched much, Dr. Tello-Ramos said, boils down to one cliché: bird brain. Nest building is such a complex behavior that, for decades, scientists thought “the little brains of birds couldn’t possibly deal with such a large amount of information, so it must be innate,” she said. Recent work has shown birds repeating others’ nest building, but those studies were often limited to individuals or small groups in labs. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29457 - Posted: 08.31.2024

By Shaena Montanari Mammalian brains famously come with a built-in GPS system: “place cells” in the hippocampus that selectively activate when an animal enters a specific location and power spatial cognition. A comparable navigation system had not been described in fish—until now. As it turns out, zebrafish larvae, too, possess place cells that integrate multiple sources of information and generate new cognitive maps when the animal’s environment changes, according to a study out today in Nature. The search for these cells in fish became “kind of like a myth, almost,” says the study’s co-lead investigator Jennifer Li, research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. She and her team were hesitant to look for place cells in fish at first, Li says, “because we figured if nobody’s seeing them after all this time,” they might not exist. But Li and her colleagues had already custom-built a microscope that tracks calcium signaling in the brains of zebrafish larvae as they swim freely. The device helped them pinpoint the place cells in the larvae’s telencephalon region. “I think this work is definitely extremely interesting, because it demonstrates that, at least in some fish, you can find place cells,” says Ronen Segev, professor of life sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, who was not involved in the study. The finding also suggests that spatial cognition has origins deep in the vertebrate evolutionary tree, Li says. There is an idea that the “hippocampus and cortex are these structures that evolved at some point to enable flexible behavior,” but evolutionarily, “it was never clear when that happened.” © 2024 Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29456 - Posted: 08.31.2024

By Katie Moisse Monkeys can memorize a sequence of images and then toggle between them in their minds, a new study has found. Each mental move is associated with a tiny burst of brain activity that could be the neural representation of a thought, the study authors say. The study is the first to find evidence that an animal creates cognitive maps based on experience and later uses them exclusively, without any sensory input, to navigate a new task. It also marks one of the first times researchers have registered brain activity tied to an ongoing, complex thought process. “It’s a very fluid process—the process of thinking. And we have no way in animals to know what they’re thinking and therefore map what we record in the brain to what’s happening in the mind,” says study investigator Mehrdad Jazayeri, professor and director of education, brain and cognitive sciences at MIT’s McGovern Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. In the new study, however, Jazayeri and his team designed a task that requires the animal to imagine a specific scenario at a specific time. “Imagination: There’s no magic to it; it’s a pattern of activity in the brain,” he says. Previous studies suggest rodents use cognitive maps to recreate the past and predict future possibilities. The new study, published last month in Nature, suggests monkeys also engage in such mental simulation and do so in the present—imagining states of the world that they just can’t see. “It’s a little bit like an animal navigating in the dark, where they’re using an internal map of where they are and where they’re going to update their sense of how close they are to their goal,” says Loren Frank, professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, who was not involved in the work. “Our brains do this all the time. But this study gives us a sense of how they do it and shows there’s an identifiable underlying process. It’s a really nice step forward.” Research image of the activity of a single neuron in a monkey brain. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29412 - Posted: 07.31.2024

By Vivian La Great Basin was burning the midnight oil on a chilly fall evening in 2016 when he made his move. Slinking out of the shadows in Laramie, Wyoming, the raccoon approached what looked like a metal filing cabinet lying on its side. He could smell a mix of dog kibble and sardines within, but 12 latched narrow doors blocked his entry. Making matters worse, a fellow raccoon had beaten him there. So Great Basin jumped on top of the cabinet and began to fiddle with the latches upside down. He quickly opened one of the doors, securing the treats and filling his belly. Humans have long regarded raccoons—renowned for their ability to jimmy their way into locked garbage cans and enter seemingly impassable attics—with a mixture of awe and scorn. But outside of the lab, researchers have little scientific sense of how clever these “trash pandas” really are. A study published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences may change that. The work was led by Lauren Stanton, a cognitive ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley who has studied raccoons for 10 years. She says she’s drawn by their quirky personalities and quick ability to adapt to environments such as urban areas. “I think it’s fascinating to think about how raccoons perceive the world.” Despite their reputation for cleverness, Stanton says raccoons generally are understudied because they can be “a menace in the lab,” gnawing on cages and biting scientists. Research on wild raccoons is even more scarce. © 2024 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29406 - Posted: 07.27.2024

By Bianca Nogrady The ability to remember and recognize a musical theme does not seem to be affected by age, unlike many other forms of memory. “You’ll hear anecdotes all the time of how people with severe Alzheimer’s can’t speak, can’t recognize people, but will sing the songs of their childhood or play the piano,” says Sarah Sauvé, a feminist music scientist now at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom. Past research has shown that many aspects of memory are affected by ageing, such as recall tasks that require real-time processing, whereas recognition tasks that rely on well-known information and automatic processes are not. The effect of age on the ability to recall music has also been investigated, but Sauvé was interested in exploring this effect in a real-world setting such as a concert. In her study1, published today in PLoS ONE, she tested how well a group of roughly 90 healthy adults, ranging in age from 18 to 86 years, were able to recognize familiar and unfamiliar musical themes at a live concert. Participants were recruited at a performance of the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra in St John’s, Canada. Another 31 people watched a recording of the concert in a laboratory. The study focused on three pieces of music played at the concert: Eine kleine Nachtmusik by Mozart, which the researchers assumed most participants were familiar with, and two specially commissioned experimental pieces. One of these was tonal and easy to listen to; the other was more atonal and didn’t conform to the typical melodic norms of Western classical music. A short melodic phrase from each of the three pieces was played three times at the beginning of that piece, and participants then logged whenever they recognized that theme in the piece. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29405 - Posted: 07.27.2024

By Elissa Welle One question long plagued memory researcher André Fenton: How can memories last for years when a protein essential to maintaining them, called memory protein kinase Mzeta (PKMzeta), lasts for just days? The answer, Fenton now says, may lie in PKMzeta’s interaction with another protein, called postsynaptic kidney and brain expressed adaptor protein (KIBRA). Complexes of the two molecules maintain memories in mice for at least one month, according to a new study co-led by Fenton, professor of neural science at New York University. The bond between the two proteins “protects each of them,” Fenton says, from normal degradation in the cell. KIBRA preferentially gloms onto potentiated synapses, the study shows. And it may help PKMzeta stick there, too, where the kinase acts as a “molecular switch” to help memories persist, Fenton says. “As Theseus’ Ship was sustained for generations by continually replacing worn planks with new timbers, long-term memory can be maintained by continual exchange of potentiating molecules at activated synapses,” Fenton and his colleagues write in their paper, which was published last month in Science Advances. Before this study, the PKMzeta mystery had two “missing puzzle pieces,” says Justin O’Hare, assistant professor of pharmacology at the University of Colorado Denver, who was not involved in the study. One was how PKMzeta identifies potentiated synapses, part of the cellular mechanism underlying memory formation. The second was how memories persist despite the short lifetime of each PKMzeta molecule. This study “essentially proposes KIBRA as a solution to both of those—and the experiments themselves are pretty convincing and thorough. They do everything multiple ways.” PKMzeta has been widely studied, but its role in memory has been shrouded in controversy for more than a decade, Fenton says. Although early work suggested that PKMzeta is necessary for memory formation, later studies found that they still form in mice missing the gene for PKMzeta. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29396 - Posted: 07.18.2024