Week 3

This week’s papers are fascinating! I may be biased due to my existing interest in memory formation, but it’s incredible to see the power of optogenetics in exploring these processes. I appreciate the pairing of Ramirez’s papers together as well. This team’s skill development over just a few years is exciting to see as a young neuroscientist without much experience watching technology and technique develop over time. This increases my understanding when reading different papers from the past. The year the paper is published and the techniques utilized is important context for analyzing and critiquing the outcome and depth of a study.

Both these studies raise questions and propose new areas of study regarding the ability to explore and manipulate memory formation as well as using it as a form of treatment. One particular area to explore is the 2013 paper’s lack of explaination of their ability to form false memories in the CA1 and the nature of CA1 engrams.  I think its very interesting that this might be due to the temporal coding of the CA1 neurons rather than the population coding. I think an innovative optogenetic experimental design would be able to hash out whether this is the true cause. The 2015 paper also brought up interesting points regarding the need to explore the link between chronically reactivated positive memory engrams and the rescue of behaviours. They hypothesize that maybe this due to the normalization of VTA firing rates, or potentially upstream/downstream modification of effector proteins. Further investigation aiming to understand this link will be essential for utilizing memory formation to treat depressive phenotypes.