Short Term What?

Science Daily: Neuroscientists Store Information in Isolated Brain Tissue; Possible Basis of Short-Term Memory.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 28, 2009) — Ben W. Strowbridge, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience and physiology/biophysics, and Phillip Larimer, PhD, a MD/PhD student in the neurosciences graduate program at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, are the first to create stimulus-specific sustained activity patterns in brain circuits maintained in vitro.

Their study will be published in the February 2010 issue of Nature Neuroscience and is currently available online.

Neuroscientists often classify human memory into three types: declarative memory, such as storing facts or remembering specific events; procedural memory, such as learning how to play the piano or shoot basketballs; and working memory, a type of short-term storage like remembering a phone number. With this particular study, Strowbridge and Larimer, were interested in identifying the specific circuits that could be responsible for working memory.

Using isolated pieces of rodent brain tissue, Larimer discovered a way to recreate a type of working memory in vitro. He was studying a particular type of brain neuron, called mossy cells, which are often damaged in people with epilepsy and are part of the hippocampus.

"Seeing the memory deficits that so many people with epilepsy suffer from led me to wonder if there might be a fundamental connection between hippocampal mossy cells and memory circuits," said Larimer.