https://www.riken.jp/press/2024/20241209_2/index.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54273-3

A team at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science discovered that dynamic neural activity transmission patterns between the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and amygdala reflect the time when fear memories are formed in mice. The results of this research are expected to contribute to elucidating the full picture of the complex long-term memory mechanism that spans multiple regions of the brain.

In this study, the research team simultaneously recorded neural activity in multiple regions of the brain when mice were recalling fear memories that had been learned at different times, and analyzed it using Transformer, a deep learning technology. The results showed that while amygdala activity is important for memories of any age, the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex control amygdala activity for older memories, linking it to memory recall. These results suggest that recalling old memories requires collaboration between multiple brain regions, and that extracting these multi-region activity patterns makes it possible to estimate the time of memory formation.