World

Mystery of brain is discovered

by chung sungwoo | February 10, 2008 at 02:17 pm

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Have you ever seen the movie called "Memento"? In this movie, the male protagonist who is suffering from amnesia manipulates his memories and becomes a cruel murder. Now it seems like the solution for him is found by Korean research team. I mean saving only good memories and erasing bad memories becomes possible thing.

Research team under the guidance of Prof. Bong-Kyun, Kang in Korea disclosed the mechanism of evoking memories stored in brain and reconstructing them for the first time in the world.

Prof. Kang of life science department at Seoul National University announced that "When people evoke memories, strong part of memory storage in brain gets loose and unites again" on Feb, 9th.

According to research team, when people try to remember certain event or knowledge, neuron and synapse(where neurons are connected) are linked together more hardly than usual, which means certain memories are stored inside of synapse.

In addition, research team published the fact that when the memories already stored in brain are taken out, protein which made synapse hard is dissolved and it causes synapse gets loose, finally stored memories can come out from the brain. Since such process is necessary for reconstructing memories, if the process is refrained or disturbed, it becomes impossible to distort or even delete some memories.

Dr. Kang's study is reported in online-edition of magazine 'Science' on Feb, 8th as an 'Express News'.

source from www.donga.com