Neuroscientists at MIT have discovered what appears to be the master gene that controls the forming of new memories in your brain. Called Npas4, the gene triggers a complex reaction that results in memories (events) being encoded into your brain’s neurons — and by knocking out Npas4 from test subjects, the neuroscientists were able to stop new memories from forming.
Before you scrunch up your face in disgust, MIT carried out this research on mice, not humans. In specific, the neuroscientists discovered Npas4’s effect by testing for contextual fear conditioning. Basically, in the control test, a healthy mouse receives a mild electric shock whenever it enters a specific chamber — and within a few minutes, it freezes in fear when it next comes across the same chamber. By knocking out Npas4 — manipulating the DNA so that the Npas4 gene is no longer present — the neuroscientists created mice that couldn’t form memories and kept running through the chamber, irrespective of the continued electric shocks. In other words, they bred mice that were fearless.
Now, I don’t want to get you too excited, but Npas4 is also present in humans, and it almost certainly has the same effect as mice. We’re obviously a long way from breeding memoryless, fearless human beings — well, legally at least; the American military is probably already working on it — but it does make you think. It’s also possible to suppress a gene through drugs, rather than having to genetically engineer a human cell line and wait 18 years for your fearless baby to reach adulthood — though whether Npas4 in specific can be suppressed, who knows.
The next step, according to the MIT neuroscientists, is to find out whether Npas4 is also present when memories are being recalled, and ultimately find out where exactly memories are stored in the brain. It might even be possible to locate the exact neurons that store specific memories — and from there, just like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or myriad sci-fi books, we’d be very close to erasing specific memories. Perhaps more excitingly, we might even be able to change the content of our memories.
Read more at MIT