I’m currently squirreling away PDFs on ~engrams~ on a truly epic scale. Please send any interesting papers on memory my way. - ThreadSky

alexis-madrigal.bsky.social • 54 days ago

I’m currently squirreling away PDFs on ~engrams~ on a truly epic scale.

Please send any interesting papers on memory my way.

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rgsheld.bsky.social•54 days ago

Other fun things include the "Jennifer Aniston neuron"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_cell

rgsheld.bsky.social•54 days ago

Lots of work from Steve Ramirez at BU (https://theramirezgroup.org/ ). This paper is old now but still very cool:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23888038/

alexis-madrigal.bsky.social•54 days ago

For like the tenth time in my life, I say to myself: I should really get a firmer handle on how optogenetics stuff works

rgsheld.bsky.social•54 days ago

Not sure what level of detail you need, but the general idea is that the protein channelrhodopsin converts light to electrical activity. Electrical activity is how neurons in the brain convey information, so it lets you change their activity experimentally. In this case making a "false memory"

alexis-madrigal.bsky.social•54 days ago

I guess what I don’t understand is how you can get the specificity you need out of all the cells in a particular area of the brain. Like: even if you know you want the fifth layer of the cortex in some known motor control area… can you really just activate some number of cells and it just works??

rgsheld.bsky.social•54 days ago

A good peer review comment 😬. Generally, you need some way to make expression specific to the cells you are interested in with genetic tricks. Cell type specific promoters, injecting viral expression vectors to specific areas, etc. Even then "light > activity" can be a sledgehammer approach.

alexis-madrigal.bsky.social•54 days ago

Finally! My last big memory question is … I feel like I have a lot of memories that are neither “episodic” nor … any recognizable category. But like … fuzzier. My sense scanning the lit is that multiple memory systems was the order of the day quite recently. Is it still that way?

alexis-madrigal.bsky.social•54 days ago

But I LOVE the studies of physical changes to cells, from dendritic spikes to “synaptic neighborhoods” …

In part because it seems to leave so much room for memory recall to be a creative act, which I am realizing I am quite keen on (from introspection!)

alexis-madrigal.bsky.social•54 days ago

I’m glad my 1000% amateur question is not too embarrassing.

I think I’m finding that my snap judgments are biased against a lot of neuroscientific methods. I think I’ve overtrained on the critiques of fMRI I heard early in my career

alexis-madrigal.bsky.social•54 days ago

Thank you!

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