Memory, brain function, and behavior: exploring the intricate connection through fear memories

In a world grappling with the complexities of mental health conditions like anxiety, depression, and PTSD, new research from Boston University neuroscientist Dr. Steve Ramirez and collaborators offers a unique perspective. The study, recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience, delves into the intricate relationship between fear memories, brain function, and behavioral responses. Dr. Ramirez, shedding light on the physical manifestation of memory in the brain.

Beyond its implications for neuroscience, their research marks significant strides in understanding memory formation and holds promise for advancing our comprehension of various behavioral responses in different situations, with potential applications in the realm of mental health. In this Q&A, Dr. Ramirez discusses the motivations, challenges, and key findings of the study.

The first thing is that with fear memories, it’s one of the most, if not the most, most studied kind of memory in rodents. It’s something that gives us a quantitative, measurable behavioral readout. So when an animal’s in a fearful state, we can begin looking at how its behavior has changed and mark those changes in behavior as like an index of fear. Fear memories in particular are our point because they lead to some stereotyped behaviors in animals such as freezing in place, which is one of many ways that fear manifests behaviorally in rodents.

An engram is this elusive term that generally means the physical manifestation of memory. So, whatever memory’s physical identity is in the brain, that’s what we term an engram. The overall architecture in the brain that supports the building that is memory. I say elusive because we don’t really know what memory fully looks like in the brain. And we definitely don’t know what an engram looks like. But, we do have tips of the iceberg kind of hints that for the past decade, we’ve been able to really use a lot of cutting edge tools in neuroscience to study.

Reference: Memory, brain function, and behavior: exploring the intricate connection through fear memories; Journal of Neuroscience, DOI:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0340-23.2023