Know Thy Positive Self

Dranovsky, A., & Leonardo, E. D. (2015). The power of positivity. Nature, 522, 294. doi:10.1038/522294a Ramirez, S., Liu, X., MacDonald, C. J., Moffa, A., Zhou, J., Redondo, R. L., & Tonegawa, S. (2015). Activating positive memory engrams suppresses depression-like behaviour. Nature, 522, 335. doi:10.1038/nature14514 I didn't totally understand the experiments in Ramirez et al (2015), but it reads like a lot of works had been done by the authors.  The basic idea is simple: if we re-activated the positive memory of mice that currently depressed, the positive memory will decrease the depressive behaviours. This basic idea was clearly illustrated by Dranovsky & Leonardo (2015), see below Of course, the actual experiment is more complicated, as well as the figures: The above figure is the figure 1a of Ramirez et al. (2015). So, there are 6 groups. The key manipulation is the positive experience, which was exposed the mice to a female conspecific in a ...

Bouton, M. E. (2004). Context and Behavioral Processes in Extinction. Learning & Memory, 11(5), 485-494. doi:10.1101/lm.78804 Milad, M. R., & Quirk, G. J. (2012). Fear Extinction as a Model for Translational Neuroscience: Ten Years of Progress. Annual Review of Psychology, 63(1), 129-151. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131631 Quirk, G. J., & Mueller, D. (2008). Neural Mechanisms of Extinction Learning and Retrieval. Neuropsychopharmacology, 33(1), 56-72. doi:10.1038/sj.npp.1301555 As I begin to do research using fear extinction paradigm, which is apparently very different from what I was doing during my PhD study, so I need to get familiar with this paradigm first. After reading a few papers related to fear extinction, I found that these three reviews are very good for a newcomer. Bouton (2004) is definitely the must-read. In this review, Bouton listed the different effects that can be considered as fear extinction. With a clear logic flow, this paper is easy to fo...

Chen, J., Leong, Y. C., Honey, C. J., Yong, C. H., Norman, K. A., & Hasson, U. (2017). Shared memories reveal shared structure in neural activity across individuals. Nat Neurosci, 20(1), 115-125. doi:10.1038/nn.4450 How memory is formed and retrieved is one of the most "hard-core" questions in cognitive neuroscience. Recently, a paper published in  Nature Neuroscience found that the pattern of neural activity when recalling memorized information across individuals is more similar than the neural pattern between encoding-recall.  In this study, participants are required to view two video clips that were extracted from TV series "Sherlock", then they recall the episode of the video without any cues. That's, free-viewing, free-recalling. Like we view a TV and then tell it to a friend, but in a fMRI scanner.  The authors found that the neural activities in certain brain regions during viewing and recalling are highly correlated, including the  defa...