For many of us, our childhood memories are a bit hazy if not completely gone. But almost every person is experiencing being called, so no one really remembers before he was four years old.”Infant amnesia“As we move through puberty, memories that may have formed before that age seem to fade away. And it’s not just us. This phenomenon appears to occur in many of our fellow mammals.
The simplest explanation for this is that the system that forms long-term memory is simply immature and does not start working effectively until the child is four years old. However, recent animal experiments suggest that the situation in mice is more complicated. Currently, studies incorporating human infants into MRI tubes suggest that memory activity begins at age 1, suggesting that results from mice may apply to us.
Less than the total recall
Mice are one of the species we know and experience infant amnesia. And thanks to more than a century of research on mice, there are some sophisticated genetic tools that allow you to explore what is actually involved in the apparent absence of an animal’s earliest memory.
a Paper released last year We will explain a series of experiments that begin with learning to see the light to a very young mouse. If nothing else is done in these mice, its association appears to be forgotten later in life due to infant amnesia.
But in this case, the researchers were able to do something. Neural activity usually results in the activation of a series of genes. In these mice, researchers designed it, so one of the activated genes encodes a protein that can modify DNA. When this protein is created, a permanent change occurs in the second gene inserted into the animal’s DNA. When activated through this process, the genes lead to the generation of photoactivated ion channels.
