New research now shows that even a brief period of stress can cause part of the brain involved in memory to start shrinking — even before changes are evident in behavior and memory itself.
The region in question is the hippocampus, a pair of curved structures at the base of our brains. This brain region encodes memories of facts and events — names, phone numbers, dates, and daily events that we need to run our lives.
“Until now, no one actually knew the evolution of these changes. Does the hippocampus shrink before or after memory loss? Or do the two happen hand-in-hand?” said Dr. Sumantra Chattarji, one of the main investigators in this study.
To address this, an international collaborative project involving Chattarji’s group from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore, India, and Dr. Shane O’Mara’s lab at Trinity College, Dublin, used rats as a model system.
[For more of this story, written by Rick Nauert, go to http://psychcentral.com/news/2...ory-loss/107726.html]
Comments (0)