Steve Ramirez

And we do know that we will get an answer to that question about whether or not diseases like Alzheimer's make memories gone and really stamp them out of existence from the brain or make them inaccessible by virtue of being the disease that it is.

So I think about it this way, that...

For over a century, really, neuroscience kind of thought of memory as it's a book that you put away in the library, you take the book out, and now we know that we scribble in new details when we recall that memory, and then we put it back in the bookshelf.

With Alzheimer's, the question is, is the edifice of memory

Is the library itself burning down so that the physical cells that hold on to that memory are no longer there?

Or...

is it that the librarian has temporarily checked out?

And we can't access those memories even though the books are there, but we have no system of getting those memories out of the bookshelves anymore.

This is, in my opinion, one of the biggest success stories of neuroscience and memory research in particular in the 21st century, which is that in rodents at least, in the mammalian brain nonetheless, in rodents,

In almost all cases of amnesia that we know of, whether it's due to drug addiction or sleep deprivation or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or even brain cancer, in all cases where memories were thought to be lost,

we've been able to artificially bring them back.

And we've been able to find the cells that hold onto those memories and jumpstart those cells to thereby jumpstart that memory.

So in rodents, that for me is, that keeps my cup half full on this because we had every reason to believe that those memories were erased.

The human brain and the mouse brain are, they're not one-to-one the same thing, but there's a lot of principles that govern both of them.

And there's a lot of biology that governs both of them.

the same way that there's a lot of biology about our DNA that governs mouse DNA, for example.

So I'd like to think that that gives us a bit of a framework now to begin asking in humans, let's entertain the possibility that these memories are actually there.

And if so, how can we bring them back through some non-invasive means, ideally?

That is where we hit the wall of where we are today, because there's countless groups trying to figure out that exact answer to see if there's ways of restoring those memories that we had every reason to believe were lost, but may not actually be lost, but just remain inaccessible.

Memory manipulation means to either spark that memory back to life, so to bring it out of dormancy and to reawaken it so that it can exist in the brain for the person or the organism in general to recall, or to dampen some parts of that memory in any capacity.