Week 3: Ramirez et. al

I found this week’s papers particularly interesting, due to the topic and the fact that they come from the same lab. I briefly learned about engram memories a few years ago, and I remember being very skeptical that such a thing could exist. However, both these papers definitely changed my mind and I was left feeling pretty convinced by the findings of Ramirez et al. 

In the 2013 paper, researchers were able to induce freezing in animals that were exposed to a context in which they were never shocked using optogenetics. I thought this was a novel and unique way to use this technique, even though I don’t think they were necessarily creating false memories but rather creating false associations (instead of remembering something that didn’t happen at all, the animal is simply recalling it in the wrong context)

The 2015 paper tied together the 2013 paper with the other papers we have read in class covering depression. By activating the dentate gyrus cells associated with positive memories, researchers were able to rescue the depression-related behavior. While this research is fascinating and can theoretically have great clinical implications, I am struggling to understand how it would work in humans in a non-invasive way. Overall, I am most impressed with the work of Ramirez et. al because of how thorough it was. They induced a depressive-like phenotype using the CIS paradigm for 10 days, and then administered several tests covering a broad range of behavioral impairments (more than the other papers we have read thus far) to make their data even more convincing.