Decoding Traumatic Memories

Decoding Traumatic Memories

Submitted by Ki Ann Goosens (artist), Eliza Kosoy, and Warren Slocum in the Goosens Laboratory at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research

McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Exposure to prolonged stress is a risk factor for developing disease, including psychiatric illness.  Here, the tick marks represent the firing of neurons in the brain of a rat during exposure to psychological stress.  The recordings are examined for changes in firing rate and patterns of neuronal firing that emerge across stress exposures.  The emergence of patterned activity reflects traumatic memory encoding.

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