Implanting Memories | Breakthrough

My work focuses on finding individual memories in the brain and actually turning them on or off. We had a series of projects where we started off by asking really simply: can we go in and can we just find a memory in the brain? Can we isolate a memory in the brain? Every memory is realized at the level of individual brain cells. We have to find the brain cells that were holding on to one particular memory.

Once we were able to do that, we asked: can we actually modulate that memory? Could we activate it? Could we inactivate it again? Can we change the contents of it? To do that, we had to go in, and we have to genetically hijack those brain cells and trick those brain cells to respond to pulses of light. We did that by artificially installing this light-sensitive switch so that now we know which brain cells are involved in holding on to a memory.

We also now have these cells that respond to pulses of light, so we can literally go into the brain, shoot lasers into the brain, and either activate those brain cells and thereby activate a memory or inactivate those brain cells and thereby inactivate a memory. We're able to go into the brain and dial up, let's say, the emotional “oof” associated with a particular memory or dial down the emotional “Uma” associated with the memory.

More recently, actually, we've been able to go into the brain and isolate individual positive memories. Now this is powerful because we can go and we can isolate and reactivate positive memories, and one, figure out what does this tell us about the brain. Right? What's happening in the brain when we do this? But in my opinion, just as importantly, we can go and use these artificially activated positive memories.

You can think of them as sort of weapons now against certain psychiatric disorders to the extent that we can model those in animals. So imagine that we can actually go in and we can generate animal models of things like anxiety, depression, PTSD, and so on, and actually harness the brain's powers and force it to jumpstart this process of recollection of a positive memory and force it to suppress some of these symptoms associated with a variety of mood disorders.

My work is addicting. You look at something under the microscope or your mouse is doing something, and if it's a true discovery, you're the only person in the world that's looking at that one thing at that moment. You're at that edge of the known and the unknown, and when you make a tiny, even incremental advance into the unknown, that's like a drug. Like, that's a whole other thing.