PsyScE C T IholoOgN 1

y TNoAMEday

MEMORY
INC.
BY YASH SHAH
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“THE LITTLE RED PILL,” as Eric Kandel calls
it, helps us tackle age-related memory
loss. Memory Pharmeuciticals, Eric Kandel’s
company, is working on exactly that.

“
However, the history of the research put
CREB? It’s a into this pill dates all the way back to the
year 1953, when the view on everything we

molecule that knew about the brain changed drastically.

In Hartford, Connecticut, Dr. Scoville

dwells inside worked as a neurosurgeon and operated
on Henry, a young man facing epilepsy. Dr.
a brain cell, Scoville’s approach to curing Henry
invovled elimi- nating the hippocampus,

and it serves the part of the brain which caused the

seizures. After the surgery, despite the
fact that the seizures dis- appeared, it was
to trigger found that the hippocam- pus was the
“royal seat for rememebering,” thus
protein diabling him from creating new mem-
ories. This meant that although he would

synthesis for be able to recognize his mother, he would

easily forget the nurse who just intoduced
herself in a matter of minutes. Yet, despite
new synaptic this tragedy which would leave Henry no
comfort, it resulted in a number of
connections psycho- logical advances. Dr. Scoville, to
begin with, made his contribution by

which concluding that Karl Lashley was wrong.

Karl Lashley, a dom- inant
neuropsychologist, had concluded that
become memory was scattered throughout the
cortex rather than being localized to a spe-
permanent cific part of the brain. According to
Henry’s case, it became clear that memory
could be pinpointed like a country on a
memories...it’s map. Brenda Milner, to move on, used
Henry’s case to identify the seperate
a brain cell’s memory systems that exist in our minds.

”
Actions like brushing our teeth, or walking,
own Velcro is also stored in our minds as memory.
However, since Henry was still able to
. brush his teeth, when given a tooth-
brush, and walk, it proved that our brain is
divided so each part serves a specific Business Magazine | April 201 1
funtion. Procedural memory exists to
skills.; Semantic memory for facts;
Declarative memory for our identity.
These discoveries due to Henry’s loss
of his hippocampus made an impression
on Kandel which interested him into the
field of neuropsychology as opposed to
his orig- inal aspiration to become a
psychoanalyst. As a reductionist, he
chose to start his first experiments on
aplysia, a giant marine snail which has
only 20,000 neurons. This exper- iment
only focused on the implicit or pro-
cedural memory of the slugs. Through
this, he discovered that neurons had
links, called synapses, which grew stronger
by passing electro chemical signals that
reinforced the relationship. These signals
were produced as a behavior was
repeated, hence proving the “use-it-or-
lose-it credo.” Through these rela-
tionships between neurons, Kandel
believed there was a mechanism that
allowed for conversion of short to long
term memories. Blocking the CREB
molecule in one of the neurons disrupted
this conversation, thus erasing the
memory. He concluded that it was the
CREB gene which allowed the con- version
of memories. In addition, Kandel stated
that “mice offered a superb genetic system
for examining the role of individual genes in
synaptic modification on the one hand, and
intact behavior - explicit memory storage -
on the other,” to which he focused the rest
of his research on the hippocampus.
Subsequent to this, Kandel’s company today
researches into this “red pill” for enhancing
CREB and avoid memory loss due to age.
However, the pill creates obvious issues with
ethics. What if the pill creates a kind of nos-
talgic incontinence? What if we are unable
to control the mental clutter it brings forth?
There are just some of the arguements pre-
sented against this pill, but the main
question still stands, “Will you take the pill?”