Friday, April 8, 2011

Blog_11 Source 1

The way our brains and memories work have been a very difficult concept to understand, and we will probably never understand all of it. In the article European Journal of Neuroscience; Mar2011, Vol. 33 Issue 6, p1101-1114, 14p, 4 Charts, ways in which memories can be impaired are discussed. A recent breakthrough in this field has led to some more understanding about the way our minds work. The discovery of the de novo hippocampal production of neurons gives us a new actor in the role of memory process. These newborn adult neurons are very important in long-term memory retention, allocentric space representation, and for flexible inferential memory expression. New studies also show that they are responsible for spatiotemporal relationships among many environmental cues for flexible use of acquired information. This basically means that they help use information stored in your brain at appropriate times. All of this leads me to believe after several more years of research, it could be possible to take these newborn neurons, reduce production, and take away one’s ability to retain information, as well as access their memory. It is very scary to think that we know so much about our brains. If a method is developed to alter these neurons, or even stop them from producing, our memories very just might be able to be wiped. I do not know how to access more than the abstract of this article, which I found on the Thompson Library search engine, so if anybody could tell me how that would be great. I would like to read more up on implanting memories into ones brain, which seems a lot less likely than wiping memories.

2 comments:

  1. I agree that it is a very scary concept and I hope that we are not able to alter the neurons or stop them from producing because we would be nothing without our memories. This seems like a very intense topic and I am excited to read more about this in your further posts.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm glad you feel the same way, I am very ignorant about this topic and I would love to find out more about what is actually possible in the future and what isn't.

    ReplyDelete