The phenomenon of false memory has been well-documented: In many court cases, defendants¹ have been found guilty based on testimony² from witnesses and victims who were sure of their recollections, but DNA³ evidence later overturned the conviction. In a step toward understanding how these faulty memories arise, MIT neuroscientists have shown that they can plant false memories in the brains of mice. They also found that many of the neurological traces of these memories are identical in nature to those of authentic⁴（真实的） memories.

 

"Whether it's a false or genuine memory, the brain's neural⁵ mechanism⁶ underlying⁷ the recall of the memory is the same," says Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience and senior author of a paper describing the findings in the July 25 edition of Science.

 

The study also provides further evidence that memories are stored in networks of neurons that form memory traces for each experience we have -- a phenomenon that Tonegawa's lab first demonstrated last year.

 

Neuroscientists have long sought the location of these memory traces, also called engrams（记忆的痕迹）. In the pair of studies, Tonegawa and colleagues at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory showed that they could identify the cells that make up part of an engram for a specific memory and reactivate it using a technology called optogenetics（光遗传学）.

 

Lead authors of the paper are graduate student Steve Ramirez and research scientist Xu Liu. Other authors are technical assistant Pei-Ann Lin, research scientist Junghyup Suh, and postdocs Michele Pignatelli, Roger Redondo and Tomas Ryan.

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