{"id":447,"date":"2009-10-20T16:11:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-20T16:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/flies-with-bad-memories\/"},"modified":"2009-10-20T16:11:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-20T16:11:00","slug":"flies-with-bad-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/flies-with-bad-memories\/","title":{"rendered":"Flies with Bad Memories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"margin: 1em; float: right; display: block; width: 178px;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/commons.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Image:Drosophila_melanogaster_-_side_%28aka%29.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/4\/4c\/Drosophila_melanogaster_-_side_%28aka%29.jpg\/300px-Drosophila_melanogaster_-_side_%28aka%29.jpg\" alt=\"Drosophila\" style=\"border: medium none ; display: block; width: 168px; height: 131px;\" \/><\/a><span>Image via <a href=\"http:\/\/commons.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Image:Drosophila_melanogaster_-_side_%28aka%29.jpg\">Wikipedia<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Victoria Gill, science reporter for BBC News, wrote in her article &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/science\/nature\/8310365.stm\">Bad memories written with lasers<\/a>&#8221; last Friday about researchers who &#8220;have devised a way to write memories onto the brains of flies,  revealing which brain cells are involved in making bad memories.&#8221; This reveals memory to be much more mechanistic than I have written about here in the past. Just last night I was in a conversation with someone that went something like &#8220;if memories and thoughts are chemical, why can&#8217;t I make you drink something and see or hear a specific memory?&#8221; Miesonbock at Oxford has found 12 cells in the fly&#8217;s brain that are responsible for &#8220;associative learning.&#8221;  The really important part of the story for me is where Miesenbock says &#8220;I have every expectation that the fundamental mechanisms that produce these  error signals are the same in the brain of the fly as they are in the brain of  the human.&#8221; I think it is a huge leap from the fly to the complexity of the human brain but it is not so huge a leap as it was from the Friday before last. Twelve neurons that can be tricked into associated a smell with a predator is still quite a ways away from understanding the role communication and social interaction play in learning, but this is certainly an important step in understanding how neurons connect and create learning.  <\/p>\n<div style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/reblog.zemanta.com\/zemified\/725a02cb-e79f-4dfe-a0bb-dca79effa3b1\/\" title=\"Reblog this post [with Zemanta]\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: medium none ; float: right;\" class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" src=\"http:\/\/img.zemanta.com\/reblog_e.png?x-id=725a02cb-e79f-4dfe-a0bb-dca79effa3b1\" alt=\"Reblog this post [with Zemanta]\" \/><\/a><span><\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Image via Wikipedia Victoria Gill, science reporter for BBC News, wrote in her article &#8220;Bad memories written with lasers&#8221; last Friday about researchers who &#8220;have devised a way to write memories onto the brains of flies, revealing which brain cells &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/flies-with-bad-memories\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[972],"class_list":["post-447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-neuron"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}