{"id":12584801,"date":"2016-03-18T10:23:35","date_gmt":"2016-03-18T10:23:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.upo.es\/diario\/?p=12584801"},"modified":"2016-03-18T11:08:39","modified_gmt":"2016-03-18T11:08:39","slug":"forgetting-to-learn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.upo.es\/diario\/english\/2016\/03\/forgetting-to-learn\/","title":{"rendered":"Forgetting to learn"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Agn\u00e9s<\/a>
Agn\u00e8s Gruart and Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Delgado<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

They say that once you\u2019ve learned to ride a bicycle, you never forget how to do it. But new research suggests that while learning, the brain is actively trying to forget. The study, by scientists at EMBL and University Pablo de Olavide in Sevilla, Spain, is published today in Nature Communications<\/i><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the first time that a pathway in the brain has been linked to forgetting, to actively erasing memories\u201d<\/strong> says Cornelius Gross, who led the work at EMBL.<\/p>\n

At the simplest level, learning involves making associations, and remembering them. Working with mice, Gross and colleagues studied the hippocampus, a region of the brain that\u2019s long been known to help form memories. Information enters this part of the brain through three different routes. As memories are cemented, connections between neurons along the \u2018main\u2019 route become stronger.<\/p>\n

When they blocked this main route, the scientists found that the mice were no longer capable of learning a Pavlovian response \u2013 associating a sound to a consequence, and anticipating that consequence. But if the mice had learned that association before the scientists stopped information flow in that main route, they could still retrieve that memory. This confirmed that this route is involved in forming memories, but isn\u2019t essential for recalling those memories. The latter probably involves the second route into the hippocampus, the scientists surmise.<\/p>\n

But blocking that main route had an unexpected consequence: the connections along it were weakened, meaning the memory was being erased.<\/p>\n

\u201cSimply blocking this pathway shouldn\u2019t have an effect on its strength,\u201d says Agn\u00e8s Gruart from University Pablo Olavide<\/strong>. \u201cWhen we investigated further, we discovered that activity in one of the other pathways was driving this weakening.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interestingly, this active push for forgetting only happens in learning situations. When the scientists blocked the main route into the hippocampus under other circumstances, the strength of its connections remained unaltered.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne explanation for this is that there is limited space in the brain, so when you\u2019re learning, you have to weaken some connections to make room for others,\u201d says Gross. \u201cTo learn new things, you have to forget things you\u2019ve learned before.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The findings were made using genetically engineered mice, but with help from Maja K\u00f6hn\u2019s lab at EMBL the scientists demonstrated that it is possible to produce a drug that activates this \u2018forgetting\u2019 route in the brain without the need for genetic engineering. This approach, they say, might be interesting to explore if one were looking for ways to help people forget traumatic experiences.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Noelia Madro\u00f1al, Jos\u00e9 M. Delgado Garc\u00eda, Azahara Fern\u00e1ndez Guiz\u00e1n, Jayanta Chatterjee, Maja K\u00f6hn, Camilla Mattucci, Apar Jain, Theodoros Tsetsenis, Anna Illarionova, Valery Grinevich, Cornelius T. Gross y Agn\u00e8s Gruart.
\nRapid erasure of hippocampal memory following inhibition of dentate gyrus granule cells. <\/b>Nature Communications. <\/i>18 March 2016. DOI: 10.1038\/NCOMMS10923<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scientists at EMBL and University Pablo de Olavide discover neural mechanisms in mouse brains that indicate that we actively forget as we learn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3258],"tags":[525,3262,592,3263,3261,3259,3260],"class_list":["post-12584801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","tag-agnes-gruart-i-masso","tag-brain","tag-jose-maria-delgado","tag-learning","tag-memory","tag-neuroscience","tag-publication"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.upo.es\/diario\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12584801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.upo.es\/diario\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.upo.es\/diario\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.upo.es\/diario\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.upo.es\/diario\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12584801"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.upo.es\/diario\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12584801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12585393,"href":"https:\/\/www.upo.es\/diario\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12584801\/revisions\/12585393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.upo.es\/diario\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12584801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.upo.es\/diario\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12584801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.upo.es\/diario\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12584801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}