Dogs retain memories, might help cure brain diseases
Published: October 26, 2006
“Don’t I know you?”
It’s one of the most common questions asked at parties, weddings, scientific conferences and, yes, even at family gatherings, often uttered with perplexed or blank eyes.
And it’s one of the questions that drives the research of Howard Eichenbaum of Boston University. Eichenbaum is among 30,000 neuroscientists from around the globe who have converged on the Georgia World Congress Center here.
Eichenbaum, a 57-year-old psychologist, expects to ask and hear the “Don’t I know you?” question a lot this week as the Washington-based Society for Neuroscience holds its annual convention in Atlanta. Brain scientists are people, too, he said with a laugh, and so they also worry about their memory lapses.
A memory scientist, Eichenbaum is one of many experts who are looking inside the brain to learn where recollections lie; most agree that they are is in a specific type of brain cell.
The scientists also have identified proteins responsible for strengthening synapses, gaps where information is exchanged between neurons. Such discoveries could lead to better memories, and perhaps even help for victims of Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementia disorders, he said.
“Understanding how these cells and proteins interact in the brain may lead to new strategies for preserving memory in the face of aging or disease,” he said.
Eichenbaum and his colleagues have shown that animals also can remember names, contexts and sequences of related events, even the animals you might consider dumb, such as rats, whose brains they probe looking for pathways similar to those in human gray matter. What they have learned, he said, applies to other animals, including people.
Recollection, for example, involves reaching beyond mere familiarity to retrieve qualitative information about where and when something was experienced, what happened before and after, and related experiences, his team said.
Eichenbaum said he also is concerned with questions such as whether animals can recollect and how memory is accomplished in their brains.
Whether Rover can tell his name from Roger, or Fido from Fencer, nobody knows for sure, Eichenbaum said. But their research indicates animals can bring back memories. “They don’t operate simply on Pavlovian conditioning but seem to have powers of recollection, like people,” Eichenbaum said.
But as people age, memory worries increase.
“We have all been in the situation where we have met someone who seems highly familiar but we cannot recall who they are or why we know them,” Eichenbaum said.
Sometimes we look for clues, try to remember where we met and the circumstances of that meeting. The most vivid recollections involve replaying entire episodes.
His two recommendations to avoid the “Don’t I know you” syndrome:
“Remember the context, like when meeting someone at a dinner party. If you remember that Joe is a friend of Sally’s, that’ll help.”
“When somebody tells me their name, I say it back again while staring them in the face. You have to say it in a way where you don’t look like an idiot. Repeat it, forcing the connection within the hippocampus.”
The importance of studying rat brains to learn more about brain circuitry is enormous, Eichenbaum said.
“When we know more about the fundamental psychological and biological processes, we can make greater strides in studying and alleviating memory loss in human aging,” he said.
Memory was just one of Sunday’s agenda topics at the Society for Neuroscience’s conference, which began Saturday and wraps up Wednesday. Among other topics were diet and the brain, Alzheimer’s Disease, addictions and the senses.
Among the presentations, Robert Zatorre of McGill University in Montreal offered his research that found that when listening to rhythms the motor regions of our brains become active, even if the body isn’t. When we listen to music, the areas of our brains that enable us to move are active, which means you don’t have to think about the music’s rhythm or tap your feet to the beat to engage your brain’s motor control areas.
“This finding goes against the traditional view,” Zatorre said, “that the brain’s motor regions are involved only in executing body movement.”
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