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Lost memories can Now be restored

In an experiment conducted on marine snails that have cellular and molecular processes very similar to humans, the Researchers have found that lost memories can be restored. The findings offer some hope for patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

For decades, most neuroscientists have believed that memories are stored at the synapses -- the connections between brain cells, or neurons -- which are destroyed by Alzheimer's disease. The new study provides evidence contradicting the idea that long-term memory is stored at synapses.

David Glanzman, a UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) professor of integrative biology and physiology and of neurobiology, said that

"As long as the neurons are still alive, the memory will still be there, which means you may be able to recover some of the lost memories in the early stages of Alzheimer's.

"It was a radical idea, but that's where the evidence leads that the nervous system appears to be able to regenerate lost synaptic connections, so if they can restore the synaptic connections, the memory will come back, which won't be easy, but it was believed that it's possible," he added.

Glanzman said the research could have significant implications for people with Alzheimer's disease. Specifically, just because the disease is known to destroy synapses in the brain doesn't mean that memories are destroyed.

Glanzman added that in the later stages of the disease, neurons die, which likely means that the memories cannot be recovered.

The cellular and molecular processes seem to be very similar between the marine snail and humans, even though the snail has approximately 20,000 neurons and humans have about 1 trillion. Neurons each have several thousand synapses.

Glanzman said there was no obvious pattern to which synapses stayed and which disappeared during the experiments, which implied that memory is not stored in synapses.

This implies that synaptic connections that were lost were apparently restored, the researchers noted.

"That suggests that the memory is not in the synapses but somewhere else." "We think it is in the nucleus of the neurons," he added.

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