Week 3

I found the topic of this week’s discussion to be extremely interesting and different. When I began reading the 2013 paper, I was lost and confused at several times during the reading – especially when the authors did not explain as to why they chose context C as well as context D (even though they both function as novel contexts). Having said that, their findings were indeed super insightful and I think they did a good job in the second paper at expanding on their previous research and exploring different avenues. For instance, I liked how they drew comparisons to other external research (chronic administration of medication may produce symptom remission) and integrated it with their own findings. Additionally, there were a few attention-grabbing results that really boggled my mind. For example, repeatedly exposing stressed mice to a positive experience did not produce the same rescue effect as reactivating the DG cells associated with the positive memory. This was really surprising as usually people tell you to distract yourself and/or engage in positive activities when you are feeling low or are depressed in hopes to alleviate the depressive symptoms and that gave me something to chew on. They also did a good job at teasing apart the specific role DG neurons play in creating false memories, and not CA1 neurons. Overall, their tedious efforts in exploring a new avenue such as this deserves credit and praise, but the inner skeptic in me wonders how it could be translated to human subjects and possibly as a treatment in the future.