How long term memories are formed

[John Clark]

It has long been a mystery about what the mechanism that forms Long term memories is, but in the March 27, 2024 issue of the journal Nature there is an article that takes a big step towards explaining it. I found it interesting because memories are a large part of what defines us. It turns out there is a relationship between the immune system remembering a virus or bacteria it had encountered before and mental memories. When long-term memories are formed there is a surge in electrical activity that is so powerful it snaps a cell's DNA, and the resulting DNA fragments triggers an immune response to repair the damage and cement the memory. It's strange that during the damage-and-repair cycle a brain cell encodes long term memories using a mechanism similar to the way the immune system remembers previous microorganism invaders, it's just that the inflammation is caused by broken strands of a cell's own DNA and not bacterial or viral DNA. They also found the protein responsible for this memory inducing inflammation, it's called TLR9, when they deactivated the gene that produces TLR9 mice found it very difficult to form long-term memories.

Innate immunity in neurons makes memories persist

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

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