Grant: Operating Grant

An irony of research on the neurobiology of memory is that we forgot to study forgetting. The majority of neuroscientists investigates memory acquisition, formation, and stabilization, and typically sees forgetting as a failure of one or more of these basic processes. While memory loss may indeed often reflect such failures, it is likely that well-organized forgetting processes exist that are involved in regular and pathological memory loss. Indeed, recent research on how the brain maintains memories in the long term suggests that an innate well-organized decay mechanism may systematically remove memories over time by taking apart essential parts of memory traces in the brain. It seems that only memories will be retained that resist this continuous force of decay. The experiments described in this research proposal aim to better understand this memory decay process. Using rats as subjects, experiments will investigate how the brain protects certain memories from this systematic destruction. Finally, this project will explore whether accelerated memory decay causes often-observed increased forgetfulness in aged individuals and whether this forgetting speed can be slowed down. Importantly, investigating how the brain regulates decay-like forgetting will offer a new perspective on memory loss in mental disorders. For example, unusually quick forgetting as seen in Alzheimer's Disease may be the result of a forgetting process that ran out of hand. In this case, therapies that would try to restore this forgetting process to normal working order could slow down the progressive destruction of memory of which patients with Alzheimer's Disease suffer.