In the brain, timing is everything
Suppose you heard the sound of skidding tires, followed by a car crash. The next time you heard such a skid, you might cringe in fear, expecting a crash to follow — suggesting that somehow, your brain had linked those two memories so that a fairly innocuous sound provokes dread.MIT neuroscientists have now discovered how two neural circuits in the brain work together to control the formation of such time-linked memories. This is a critical ability that helps the brain to determine when it needs to take action to defend against a potential threat, says Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience and senior author of a paper describing the findings in the Jan. 23 issue of Science.“It’s important for us to be able to associate things that happen with some temporal gap,” says Tonegawa, who is a member of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. “For...