In Brain’s Electrical Ripples, Markers for Memories Appear
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.
It’s very easy to break things in biology,” said Loren Frank, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s really hard to make them work better.”
Yet against the odds, researchers at the New York University School of Medicine earlier this summer that they had improved the memory of lab animals by tinkering with the length of a dynamic signal in their brains—a signal that has fascinated neuroscientists like Frank for decades. The feat is exciting in its own right, with the potential to enhance recall in people someday, too. But it also points to a
