| Posted onDecember 5, 2024byDr. Monica M. Bertagnolli Your memories of life experiences are encoded in collections of neurons in the brain that were active at the time the event took place. Later, those same patterns of neural activity are replayed in your mind to help stabilize your memories of past events. But new research suggests those memories arent fixed. An NIH-supported study in male mice reveals how an older memory can be refreshed and altered by association with newer events. The findings, reported inNature, show that a memory of a recent negative event can become linked to the memory of a neutral event that took place days earlier, changing the way its remembered. This provides important insight into what we know about how the brain updates and reorganizes memories based on new information. These findings could also have implications for our understanding of neurobiological processes that might occur in the brain in memory-related mental health conditions likepost-traumatic stress disorder(PTSD), when people feel stress or fear even in situations that present no danger. | 