动物实验 z-bo 2020-11-13 372

　　In ancient times, Wei Zheng advised Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty for ten times, and one of them was to be prepared for danger in times of peace.

　　The negative emotion of worrying about fear is not completely meaningless. It makes humans more vigilant and cautious in dangerous situations so as to obtain a better chance of survival. It has played an important role in human evolution. However, everything is too bad, too much fear can lead to anxiety. According to statistics, 8% of Americans have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and a total of 18% of Americans have varying degrees of anxiety.

　　Want to say goodbye with horrible memories? If you are a little mouse, scientists can already do it for you!

　　In a paper published in the latest "Nature-Neuroscience" journal, scientists observed under a special microscope the neuronal response to the fear stimulus in the mouse brain. The poor mouse was first stimulated by the electric shock accompanied by the high-pitched sound to have a psychological shadow, and then the scientists tried to find the nerve "channel" that responded to the horror recall, and the mouse whose nerve channel was closed by the scientists really lost the previous horror. Memories.

　　Can the unloved mice really help scientists find the same way to make humans forget their psychological shadows?

　　There are a series of neural pathways in the brain. Previous research results have shown that the formation of fear is through a one-way path from the auditory cortex of the brain to the lateral amygdala. Yang Yang's team from the Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered a new neural pathway related to fear memory.

　　In an interview with CCTV, she said that everyone thought that this cranial nerve connection pathway did not exist before, and authoritative scholar reviews all denied the existence of the new pathway. Nevertheless, Yang Yang started by studying the Allen Human Brain Atlas and spent several years confirming his suspicions. This neural pathway not only exists, but also plays a key role in the extraction of fear memory.

　　Finding the neural pathway is the first step, and the ultimate goal is to clear the memory.

　　When animals form memories, new connections between axons and dendrites will also be formed. In the experiment, Yang Yang and his colleagues observed the formation of a large number of synapses near the new pathways in the stimulated mouse brain, which further confirmed the new theory.

　　In order to ensure that the new neural pathway can be inhibited, Yang Yang and the others used two technical methods, optogenetics and chemical genetics, to reduce the activity of this pathway, and the inhibitory effect was very obvious. Yang Yang believes that the current progress is relatively smooth, but the brains of mice and humans are not exactly the same. Mice are hearing animals, and humans are visually dominant animals. The next step in research should turn to the visual animal monkey, which is similar in structure to the human brain. Anatomical results have shown that there may be a new pathway from the lateral amygdala to the visual cortex. The effect of this new neural pathway remains to be studied.

　　Yang Yang's research results have also received international attention. KayTye, a neuroscientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes that transcranial direct current stimulation is a good next research direction. Transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) delivers current to any area of the brain surface by connecting electrodes close to the scalp, and analyzes the function of the cerebral cortex by analyzing the response caused by the current. The lateral amygdala is in the deep layer of the brain, but the auditory cortex is just on the surface. Transcranial direct current stimulation and similar research methods are likely to come in handy.

　　In the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), both couples come to the "Forget Love Clinic" to delete their love memories. However, the current scientific research is still far away from the ability of the "Emotion Clinic" in the movie. Closing the neural pathways that transmit fearful memories only temporarily prevents people from remembering that memory. When this day really comes, are you willing to delete the horrible memories that grew up with you? Technology is very beautiful, do you choose to delete and escape your own psychological shadow, or face it bravely?