Awake mental replay of past experiences is essential for making informed choices, suggests a study in rats. Without it, the animals' memory-based decision-making faltered, say scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health. The researchers blocked learning from, and acting on, past experience by selectively suppressing replay -- encoded as split-second bursts of neuronal activity in the memory hubs of rats performing a maze task.
"It appears to be these ripple-like bursts in electrical activity in the hippocampus that enable us to think about future possibilities based on past experiences and decide what to do," explained Loren Frank, Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, a grantee of the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). "Similar patterns of hippocampus activity have been detected in humans during similar situations."...read more>>>...
