Reveal the operating mechanism of the brain to maintain memory, Chinese scientist "Cell" published an article

▎WuXi AppTec content team editor When you hear a string of unfamiliar phone numbers or numeric passwords, you need your brain to remember it briefly before entering the phone
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Short-term memory is an important cognitive function.
Coherent short-term memory ensures that we can act accordingly
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 A few days ago, a research paper published online in the top academic journal "Cell" revealed to us how the brain works behind short-term memory
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A research team led by Professor Li Nuo, a Chinese scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, in collaboration with Professor Shaul Druckmann of Stanford University, discovered that the brain uses modular organization to ensure continuous neural activity
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"When we remember certain things, neurons in the prefrontal cortex will have continuous electrical activity
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For many years, this continuous electrical activity has been thought to exist in many brain areas, and short-term memory depends on the mutual communication between these areas.

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"Professor Lee Snow said," but how these brain regions cooperate and properly perform memory functions, but it is a mystery
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"to solve the mystery, in this study, Professor Li Connaught team to design a mouse A simple task that requires the use of short-term memory: first use the beard to identify the location of the tactile stimulus (front or back), and then use the action of licking the straw (left or right) to report.
If it is correct, you will be rewarded
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After training, the mice had a delay of a few seconds before making actions, so researchers had the opportunity to observe brain activity during short-term memory
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At the same time, the researchers simultaneously recorded the electrical activity of a large population of neurons in the left and right prefrontal cortex of the mice
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 ▲When mice perform short-term memory tasks, the prefrontal cortex of the left and right sides of the brain exhibited highly consistent and continuous neural activity (picture source: reference [1]) They found that during the memory process, the left and right hemispheres of the brain each have a representation The neural activity copy of the memory information
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"We have seen that in the cortex of the left and right hemispheres, many neurons have coordinated and simultaneous electrical activity, and the activity in one area increases, and the other area will follow
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" The researchers described
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"We hypothesize that this coordination between the left and right brains is the basis for the formation of short-term memory
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" In order to further understand how the left and right hemispheres of the brain are coordinated, the researchers used optogenetics to interfere with one side and directly inhibit thousands of neurons.
Activities and observe the consequences
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 This gave the researchers an unexpected discovery: when one side of the nerve activity is disturbed, the other side will maintain continuous activity, by cutting off the communication with the opposite side, to prevent the further spread of local destructive information
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Professor Li Nuo explained: "This is like a modern power grid.
They are connected to let the current flow, but at the same time they also monitor for faults and close the connection when necessary to ensure that the entire grid will not be paralyzed
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" ▲Independent modular organization, guarantee In order to maintain the coherence of memory in the presence of local disturbances (picture source: reference [1]), the researchers concluded that these results indicate that the brain has increased robustness through modular organization, allowing the brain to withstand a certain degree of injury.
Disease, protect important cognitive functions from damage
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This principle will inspire both future research on artificial intelligence and the development of repair methods to treat brain diseases
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 Source of title picture: 123RF Reference material: [1] Guang Chen et al.
, (2021) Modularity and robustness of frontal cortical networks.
Cell Doi: https://doi.
org/10.
1016/j.
cell.
2021.
05.
026[2] Blocking communication key tosupporting proper communication in the brain.
Retrieved July 5, 2021 from https://