Texas A&M University researchers accomplish the impossible; recover lost memories.
The brain is a puzzle whose pieces we are putting together little by little. We know a lot about it, but there are still some unknowns in the air that only find answers in highly variable predictions and hypotheses.
Although it is more typical to say that the heart ignite the spark of life, the brain is where all our experiences are stored and take place, from birth to death. One of the concepts faced by sciences such as ethology or neuroscience, is memory. Is it something physical? Disappears? Is overwritten as if it were a computer?
The long journey of our memory
To better understand how our memory works, we must understand that form a physical space in our brain, how if of a Pendrive concerned. However, when a memory is lost, stored information, the typical process that we would see on a computer when deleting a file, or in a football game, where one team wins, the other loses is not happening.
The place par excellence where our memories reside is the hippocampus, which is also responsible for processing our emotions in conjunction with our memory.When a deterioration occurs in one of the elements of this system, the memories are not made accessible or cannot be accessed as easily as before; and our hippocampus was not going to escape this deterioration.
Along with decreased neurogenesis (production of new neurons) age and neurodegenerative diseases affect our memories reducing the volume of the hippocampus.
Is it possible to recover lost memories?
The researchers of the Texas A&M University have shown with their study published in Stem Cells Translational Medicine that memory recovery is possible, thanks to the insertion of stem cells in the hippocampus, using a young animal model.
We all know the excellent results stem cells are offering in regenerative medicine, but this study takes the cake. They succeed thanks to their ability to tolerate hypoxia. (absence of oxygen) compared to previous attempts to recover memory.
Using how donor cells come from the sub-ventricular area of the brain, an area analogous to the well-known marrow, and possesses a large number of neural stem cells whose main function is to serve as a repair during brain damage and to replace lost neurons.
At the moment, there is great expectation in this finding since it has achieved what has been proposed in animal models, but tests are still necessary to know the consequences that it would have on behavior and on the human organism, to prevent it from ending up like any other movie. science fiction.
