Week 3

I was a little skeptical of the entire experiment from the moment I started reading the 2013 paper simply because of what they were proposing in terms of creating a false memory. I wasn’t sure how they were going to be able to actually prove that this was, in fact, what was done. I’m still not sure that that’s exactly what they did, but I am satisfied with their method. Being able to mark particular neurons and check for activation at other points is exactly what I figured you would have to do but I didn’t know we could actually do that. I always read of marking entire parts of the brain but never particular individual neurons, so this was news to me and I found it really cool. 

Even though I thought the method was really cool, I still don’t think they induced a false memory. We can’t really say the mice had the memory of the shocking scenario. Rather, I think it just caused the mice to mis-construe that environment with getting shocked. But, then again, maybe that’s the same thing because how would they know, if they don’t sort of envision the shock happening. I guess I can believe it, but my inner mind doesn’t think it is enough: I just don’t know what else they would do. Overall, I was satisfied with the 2015 paper after getting over my dissonance from the 2013 paper.