My first awkward attempt at a crawl. The first sensation of solid food. Perhaps even the first hug in the mother’s arms. We may not remember them, but research on rats suggests that our brains still store those memories.
A new study conducted at Trinity College, Dublin, involving an immunological model of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in mice, shows that the mother’s immune system has access to so-called memories of life’s earliest experiences. The surprising role it plays in regulation has been revealed. infantile amnesia.
The findings not only help us understand or access these precious moments, but also help explain why some people with autism have special talents. Helpful. remember what happened From an ancient time that most of us have long forgotten.
“Infantile amnesia is perhaps the most common yet underappreciated form of memory loss in humans and mammals.” To tell says Thomas Ryan, a neuroscientist at Trinity College in Dublin.
“Despite its widespread association, little is known about the biological conditions underlying this amnesia or its impact on the engram cells that encode each memory. As a society, we , we assume that infant forgetfulness is an inevitable fact, so we don’t pay much attention to it.”
Our spiritual autobiography is usually It will start someday Between our 2nd and 3rd birthdays. It’s not that our brains can’t perceive the world before this age. Research in rats It has also been suggested that our brains are fully capable of forming memories, storing them away in our neurological libraries in the form of structures called engrams.
Assuming we simply no longer have the keys to the vaults that store our earliest experiences, researchers need to consider the mechanisms that keep those memories inaccessible. .
Sometimes there were clues. Infantile amnesia is thwarted in rats Use of medicines In addition to specific neurotransmitters, Regular use of corticosteroidsThis strongly suggests that biochemical trends are actively eroding pathways to long-term memory.
So Ryan and his team focused on changes in the environment dominated by the mother’s immune system.
It is already suspected that it may influence the appearance of features associated with neurological symptoms including ASD It was hypothesized that maternal immune activation (MIA) may also influence pathways associated with infantile amnesia.
The researchers used young and adult mice that were conditioned to fear electric shock and compared them to mice born to mothers who developed an immune response during the second trimester.
Not only did the male offspring of these mothers show signs of social behavioral deficits similar to those with ASD, but there was also evidence that they remembered frightening events for much longer than their sister and control mice. there were.
Further studies using transgenic mice carrying genes that mark memory neurons revealed critical differences in the structure and size of engrams in the hippocampal regions of men with MIA. dentate gyrusis already well understood to be important in memory formation.
The key to this process appears to be a small immune protein called . Cytokine IL-17a. Male mice born to mothers genetically engineered to lack this protein experienced infantile amnesia even when the same immune response was elicited during pregnancy.
It’s not clear why mammalian brains developed a “forget switch” at such an early moment, but now that the mechanism is clear, researchers believe that memories remain accessible in some minds. And we are one step closer to understanding why it disappears in other minds.
“The trajectory of our brain’s early development appears to influence what we remember and forget as we move through early childhood.” To tell Neuroscientist Sarah Power is the study’s lead author and is currently at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany.
“We now want to investigate in more detail how development influences memory storage and retrieval in early childhood. This has many important implications from both an educational and medical perspective. It could have a ripple effect.”
This study scientific progress.
