In a new study, researchers led by Atsuhiko Hattori at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) in Japan have shown that melatonin and two of its metabolites help memories stick around in the brain and can shield mice, and potentially people, from cognitive decline.

Memory loss associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may be able to be restored by inhibiting certain enzymes involved in abnormal gene transcription, according to a preclinical study by researchers at the University at Buffalo. The findings could pave the way toward new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. The paper will be published on Dec. 9 in […]

Now, neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School have taken a decisive step in the quest to understand the biology of long-term memory and find ways to intervene when memory deficits occur with age or disease. Reporting in Nature on Dec. 9, they describe a newly identified mechanism that neurons in the adult mouse hippocampus use to […]

By studying roundworms (Caenorhabditis elegans), scientists at the University of Basel have now discovered a molecular mechanism of long-term memory that is also involved in memory loss in old age. They report on their findings in the journal Current Biology. The team led by Dr Attila Stetak, Professor Andreas Papassotiropoulos and Professor Dominique de Quervain […]

New research found the stronger a memory is first encoded, the easier it is for a person to notice subsequent changes and to integrate them into their updated understanding. “The bigger the discrepancy is between a previous memory and what happens the next time,” Zacks said, “the stronger the signal is that you need to […]

new research shows how the differences between how people reimagine common scenarios can be observed in brain activity and quantified. These unique neurological signatures could ultimately be used to understand, study, and even improve treatment of disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. “When people imagine similar types of events, each person does it differently because they […]

The brain encodes information collected by our senses. In order to perceive and interact with the environment, however, these sensory signals must be interpreted in the context of past experiences stored in the brain and the individual’s current aims. A team led by Prof. Dr. Johannes Letzkus, Professor at the Faculty of Medicine Faculty of […]

The brain and its functions still pose many open questions. One of them is how exactly we form long-term memories about the environment. In a new study Ryuichi Shigemoto and his group from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) together with researchers from Aarhus University and the National Institute for Physiological Sciences […]

A McGill-led multi-institutional research team has discovered that during memory consolidation, there are at least two distinct processes taking place in two different brain networks – the excitatory and inhibitory networks. The excitatory neurons are involved in creating a memory trace, and the inhibitory neurons block out background noise and allow long-term learning to take […]

Animals and humans have the hormone ghrelin in their stomachs. Ghrelin tells animals as well as humans when they are hungry and helps regulate their metabolism, but scientists have never been certain how exactly it works. To learn more about how ghrelin influences hunger, metabolism and memory, researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, […]