fear conditioning

Strategies to make lab animals forget, remember, or experience false recollections probe how memory works, and may inspire treatments for neurological diseases.

The animals develop a new memory that overrides the fearful one by inhibiting the cells that encode the original memory.

Researchers have developed ways to manipulate neurons involved in a particular memory to make mice recall an experience or to remember something that never happened.

Memory formation in mice involves coordinated activity at the cellular level that likely leads to new circuits in the brain.

Researchers determine the neurological mechanics underpinning a technique to extinguish fearful memories using goal-directed eye movements.

Expression or translation of some genes must be turned off in the mouse hippocampus for memories to form.