Science & Technology

Could remembering something actually damage our brain cells ?

By T.K. Randall
April 29, 2024 ·  5 comments

Memory formation is even stranger than we could have imagined. Image Credit: Bing AI / Dall-E 3 It stands to reason that in order to function in our daily lives, we need to form new memories, otherwise we would be unable to remember anything that happened to us in the past.

According to a new study, however, this process might actually be damaging our brains.

For the research, an international team of scientists analyzed the hippocampal neurons of mice during memory formation and found evidence of brain inflammation and DNA damage.

While it is not unusual for DNA breaks to occur in the brain (these are typically repaired very quickly), the damage caused during memory formation seemed to be a lot more significant.

On the plus side, the memories formed were a lot more resistant to outside forces, essentially locking them in permanently in a way that made them protected from external influences."This is noteworthy because we're constantly flooded by information, and the neurons that encode memories need to preserve the information they've already acquired and not be distracted by new inputs," said neuroscientist Jelena Radulovic from New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Ultimately then, it seems that forming new memories does cause at least some damage.

"Inflammation of brain neurons is usually considered to be a bad thing, since it can lead to neurological problems such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease," said Radulovic.

"But our findings suggest that inflammation in certain neurons in the brain's hippocampal region is essential for making long-lasting memories."

Not something that we need to be worrying about, then.

"It seems likely that over the course of evolution, hippocampal neurons have adopted this immune-based memory mechanism by combining the immune response's DNA-sensing TLR9 pathway with a DNA repair centrosome function to form memories without progressing to cell division," said Radulovic.

Source: Science Alert | Comments (5)

Tags: Brain