It Is...Remarkable': New 'Breakthrough' Allows Scientists to Implant Memories Into Mice

It sounds like the plot of Hollywood-hit "Inception," but it's actually real life.

Neuroscientists in France have, for the first time ever, implanted memories into the minds of sleeping mice, according to a report published in New Scientist.

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The team of experts hacked the rodents' brains by using an electrode to stimulate areas of the brain that would create a positive memory while the mice slept. When the rodents woke up, they darted to the area associated with the false memory, scientists said.

"The mouse develops a goal-directed behaviour to go towards the place," Karim Benchenane, who led the team, told the New Scientist. "It proves that it's not an automatic behaviour. What we create is an association between a particular place and a reward that can be consciously accessed by the mouse."

"The mouse is remembering enough abstract information to think ‘I want to go to a certain place', and go there when it wakes up," added neuroscientist Neil Burgess. "It's a bigger breakthrough (than previous studies) because it really does show what the man in the street would call a memory — the ability to bring to mind abstract knowledge which can guide behaviour in a directed way."

The study also provided new insight into what scientists refer to as "place cells."

“This is exciting because it provides excellent evidence for the importance of place cells in guiding navigation to goals,” Hugo Spiers, a spatial cognition researcher, told the Guardian. “It is also remarkable that the authors have been able to incept a false memory into the brain during sleep using this method.”

The New Scientist expanded on the new research, illustrating ways the new technology might be used in the future.

You could probably use the same approach to alter a person's memory to your own advantage. 

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It is much more difficult to create an entirely new memory from scratch. Benchenane's team drew on the mice's existing memories of space and altered them. "It's not like they have created a whole new space that the animal is exploring in its head," says Loren Frank at the University of California, San Francisco. "Real experiences involve all of our senses and movement through space, and people, places and things," he says. "We are nowhere near recreating that richness – what we can do is take advantage of it and modify it."

 These modifications could be for better or worse, says Frank. "There are a few ways of thinking about this – there's the medical application, and there's the more Orwellian application, where the government gets inside people's heads and starts to control them," he says. "It's unbelievably hard to do any of this, so I'm not deeply worried about it, but it's not impossible that it could happen."

Researchers had previously said they had developed a pill that successfully erased memories.

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