Black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapilluslittle North American passerine birds that reside in deciduous and combined forests, have remarkable memories that can remember the areas of countless morsels of food to assist them endure the winter season. Now, researchers at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute have actually found how the chickadees can keep in mind numerous information: they remember each food area utilizing brain cell activity similar to a barcode.
Chettih et alpropose that animals remember episodic memories by reactivating hippocampal barcodes. Image credit: Chettih et aldoi: 10.1016/ j.cell.2024.02.032.
“We discover that each memory is tagged with a special pattern of activity in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that shops memories,” stated Dr. Dmitriy Aronov, senior author of the research study.
“We called these patterns ‘barcodes’ due to the fact that they are incredibly particular labels of private memories– for instance, barcodes of 2 various caches are uncorrelated even if those 2 caches are ideal beside each other.”
“There are numerous findings in people that are absolutely constant with a barcode system,” included Dr. Selmaan Chettih, very first author of the research study.
Researchers have actually understood for years that the hippocampus of the brain is needed for episodic memory, however it had actually been much harder to comprehend precisely how those memories were encoded.
That’s in part since it’s difficult to understand most of the times what an animal may be keeping in mind at a specific time.
To navigate this issue in the brand-new research study, Dr. Aronov and his associates sought to chickadees.
They understood chickadees provided a distinct chance to study episodic memories due to the fact that the birds cache food products and after that should keep in mind to return for them later on.
“Each cache is a distinct, obvious, and quickly observable minute in time throughout which a brand-new memory is formed,” Dr. Aronov stated.
“By concentrating on these unique minutes in time, we had the ability to determine patterns of memory-related activity that had actually not been discovered before.”
The scientists needed to craft arenas that permit in-depth and automatic tracking of habits as chickadees cache and obtain food.
They likewise needed to establish innovations for massive, thick neural recordings in their brains as the birds moved about easily.
Their brain recordings throughout caching exposed really sporadic, short-term barcode-like patterns of shooting throughout hippocampal nerve cells. Each barcode includes just about 7% of the cells in the hippocampus.
“When a bird makes a cache, about 7% of the nerve cells react to that cache. When a bird makes a various cache, a various group of 7% of nerve cells react,” Dr. Aronov stated.
Those neural barcodes occurred together with traditional activity of nerve cells in the brain that are set off in action to specific locations, properly called location cells.
Remarkably, the episodic memory barcodes for caching areas that were close to each other had no similarity.