Researchers have long know that emotionally-charged memories, particularly those that involve fear, tend to stay around longer than other recollections. A team from the University of Southern California has actually watched imaging under a microscope as a fear experience was encoded in the brain of a living fish.
Zebra fish are common in such studies, because they are transparent and they can easily be genetically engineered. The scientists engineered zebra fish to have a fluorescent protein marker in their brain synapses. Then they trained them to fear light. When a fish was exposed to a light, inducing a fear response, they expected the synapses of the palladium (a brain area analogous to the amygdala in mammals) to grow. Instead, they witnessed some synapse "pruning" in the palladium, and synapse building in other parts of the palladium. In other words, they rearranged their synapses.
Read a deeper dive into this research and its implications at Quanta magazine. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Andrey Andreev, Thai Truong, Scott Fraser; Translational Imaging Center, USC)
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