The original version Injured This story I appeared Quanta Magazine.
When the Todd Squatter was about to be 3 years old, her 4 -year -old sister died due to Lukeemia. Recalling the long marks of his presence in the house, he said, “An empty bedroom with me. A swing set.” He was a missing person – never said about which I remembered only one. Sachter put the stairs in the kitchen.
It is noteworthy that, after more than 60 years, the socket remembers this fast moment of childhood. The amazing nature of the memory is that every memory is a physical trace, which is a brain tissue through neuronic molecular machinery. How the essence of a living moment is encoded and later recovered is one of the central response questions in neuro science.
Sacter became a neuro scientist in pursuit of a response. At the State University of New York in Brooklyn, he studies the molecules involved in maintaining basic memory to neuronal contacts. The question that has always been focused on it was first described by the famous biologist Francis Creek in 1984: How can memories last for decades, when the body molecules decrease and are replaced in a few days, weeks or more months?
In 2024, working with a team in which his longtime fellow Andrei Fenton, New York University’s Neuro Scientist, presented a possible explanation in a article published. Science development. Researchers discovered that permanent bonds between the two proteins are firmly associated with synapses, which are links between neurons. Synaptic strength is considered to be the basic for the formation of memory. Since these proteins decrease, new people take their place in an associated molecular exchange that maintains the integrity of the bond and therefore, memory.
In 1984, Francis Creek described a biological Kundram: memories last year, while most of the day or weeks decrease. “Then how is the memory stored in the brain so that it is relatively immune to the ino turnover?” He wrote in nature.
Photo: National Library of Medicine/Science Source
Researchers have presented “a very reliable matter” that “the two molecules need interaction for memory storage,” said Carl Peter Gaiz, a neurobologist at Kings College London, who was not involved in the work. These results have presented a tremendous reaction to the crackdown, and to explain how framey molecules maintain memories that run for a lifetime.
Molecular memory
At the beginning of his career, Sacter made a discovery that would create the rest of his life. After studying under the James Schwartz, a pioneer of Moleemati memory at Columbia University, he opened his lab in the Sunny Dowan State to search for Anu, which could help to tell how long there are long -term memories.
What he was looking for will be in the synapses of the brain. In 1949, psychologist Donald Heb suggested that repeated activation of neuron strengthens the links between them, or, such as neurobologist Carla Schutz later said: “Cells that fired together, combine together.” In the subsequent decades, many studies have suggested that the stronger relationship between the neurons who maintains the memories, the better the memories are.
In the early 1990s, in a dish in his lab, Sacter encouraged a piece of rat’s hippocampus. A small region of the brain is linked to memories of events and locations, as the interactions Sacter imitated memory and storage to activate nerve routes in the dean with his sister. Then he searched for any molecular changes that took place. Whenever he repeated experience, he saw a high level of protein within the synapses. He said, “Until the fourth time, I was so, that’s it.”
