Neural Mechanisms In Mouse Brains Indicate We Actively Forget As We Learn (medicalxpress.com)

An anonymous reader writes from an article on MedicalXpress: They say that once you've learned to ride a bicycle, you never forget how to do it. But new research suggests that while learning, the brain is actively trying to forget. "This is the first time that a pathway in the brain has been linked to forgetting, to actively erasing memories," says Cornelius Gross, who led the work at EMBL. At the simplest level, learning involves making associations, and remembering them. Working with mice, Gross and colleagues studied the hippocampus, a region of the brain that's long been know to help form memories. Information enters this part of the brain through three different routes. As memories are cemented, connections between neurons along the 'main' router become stronger. When they blocked this main route, the scientists found that the mice were no longer capable of learning a Pavlovian response -- associating a sound to a consequence, and anticipating that consequence. But if the mice had learned that association before the scientists stopped information flow in that main route, they could still retrieve that memory. This confirmed that this route is involved in forming memories, but isn't essential for recalling those memories. The latter probably involves the second route into the hippocampus, the scientists surmise. But blocking that main route had an unexpected consequence: the connections along it were weakened, meaning the memory was being erased.

Comments

Which is why

[justthinkit]

Which is why propaganda -- commercials, "news", educational B.S. -- is so important. To the 1%.

and water is wet

[Anonymous Coward]

and water is wet... so glad we paid a few hundreds of thousands of dollars for this research

Re:and water is wet

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not enough to rely on uncontrolled observations to base our "common sense". In order to have good quality knowledge, we need our observations to be done in the scientific method and we need experiments that are repeatable and indeed, repeated by third parties.

Re: and water is wet

[Anonymous Coward]

And heat is a fluid, duh. Wow, think of the money we'll save with this new approach!

We also forget as we remember

[Anonymous Coward]

This type of research has also shown that the act of remembering can can memory loss/corruption if the memory isn't stored correctly after recall. This failure can become a feature with certain drugs and facing your fears. Afterward, your phobia free. Interesting stuff.

I noticed this

[Anonymous Coward]

In this internet age I like to read a lot about various random things (e.g. going to wikipedia and taking random direction). But at the same time I seem to forget quickly. More I focus to learn new things, sooner the old stuff fades away, like a FIFO. Other bad side is that learning like that doesn't give brain chance to organize the information well. The great value is always in adapting to use knowledge in new ways, but this needs constantly rethinking the purpose of the stuff you learn, as well as going back to repeat old stuff.

Re:I noticed this

[Anonymous Coward]

Human memory is a volatile thing, it works by associating emotions to the physical sensations that we experience. The thing about these physical sensations is that it doesn't have to be observed in real life, you can actually imagine a situation and emotion and learn things that way! So as we learn/remember stuff, neural pathways get formed and strengthened. I'm thinking that as those neural pathways get strengthened, the older pathways are smaller by comparison and are also more difficult to access by comparison. This is probably the mechanism that happens when we learn new stuff and forget the old stuff that we don't actively nurture.

Re:I noticed this

[Hylandr]

Good thing we have Human brains and not mouse brains.

Re:I noticed this

[vivian]

I am not a neuroscientist, but given what we know about artificial neural networks, it seems to me that forgetting has to be a necessary part of the learning process - allowing neural pathways to be reconfigured to whatever you are learning.
We know with artificial neural networks, that training towards one goal necessarily comes at the expense of other goals - and for a given network, the more different patterns it has to be able to recognize, the harder the training is and the more error prone the recognition is. Now of course the human brain is way more sophisticated than even the most complex neural networks we have devised to date, but I think the principal is the same. We start out in life with billions more synaptic connections than we have as an adult, with the number rapidly diminishing as we learn how to walk, communicate and function in society - which makes it possible for us to learn just about anything as a child, but also as we get older makes it harder for example, to pick up languages or even change our accent.

Although it is possible to learn an instrument, be good at martial arts, be able to paint a picture lworthy of hanging in a gallery, write a sonnet and remember all the details of what you had for breakfast 10 years ago, the more you try and improve one area, the more the other areas will be slightly degraded, as the synapses are rearranged to do whatever it is you are learning.

  With enough practice you might be able to excel at several of these things, but something has to give. I wouldn't be surprised of the myth of the absent minded professor has some roots in this - the more specialised and in depth your learning and knowledge is on a subject, the more unrelated and unused areas will suffer.
Of course, someone with an overall larger neurological capacity might be able to learn more of these things, but specialising in one thing will I think come at the expense of being a generalist.
Thats why we need experts in different fields - because you literally can't learn everything and be as good at all things compared to beign very good in a particular field.

Personally speaking, I know I am awful at memorising things, but do very well at figuring out problems - I am sure if I somehow becamse a lot better at memorising things, my problem solving skills would diminish.

Now some people have started messing around with "smart drugs" that can accelerate learning, I'd lay money on it that it will turn out that they do indeed help you learn whatever it is you are doing faster, but at the cost of greater degradation of past skills and memories. I wouldn't touch those with a barge pole.

Re:I noticed this

[Anne Thwacks]

forgetting has to be a necessary part of the learning process

This. A thousand times this!

Forgetting is to remembering as addition of negative numbers is to addition of positive numbers!

If you cannot forget, you cannot learn either.

it indicates mice, not humans, actively forget

[turkeydance]

or something like that.

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

You must unlearn what you have learned.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

You must unlearn what you have learned.

This is the cure for the "Yips". Well documented through another pathway. Nice to see that we have found how this works in a nuts and bolts way. Now if I can get all the nuts and bolts out of my brain! YIPEE!

Forgetting is a precondition of intelligence

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the cornerstones of mathematics is forgetting certain distinctions and identifying "different" stuff as one.

Without the human experience of forgetting, this is hardly imaginable.

If you haven't yet, read this story by J L Borges: Funes, the memorious. A mind that never loses memory is a dump bin.

Homer Simpson was Right

[wisnoskij]

Remember when I took that home wine-making course and I forgot how to drive? - Homer Simpson

Does that mean ...

[geantvert]

Does that mean that if we kill all mouses then we will have a better memory?

Re:Does that mean ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it'll force you to learn the keyboard shortcuts.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Article stinks!

[no-body]

Comparing riding a bicycle with associations and related memories is like comparing apples to oranges.

Cerebellum (old and small brain part close to brain stem at the back) is managing balance, movement coordination etc. required to use a bicycle, walk, run, reach, grasp.

This sure is not information stored and related to hippocampus, association and forgettable stuff there.

PS.: That's why neck shots in humans and bolts in necks of slaughter animals totally take down an organism immediately for good - brain stem and cerebellum.

Wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

...what were we talking about?

I did a study.

[Anonymous Coward]

It indicated that we all slept with Katy Perry because a human slept with Katy Perry.

Can I have some funding now? Thanks.

Re:I did a study.

[Anonymous Coward]

It indicated that we all slept with Katy Perry because a human slept with Katy Perry.

Can I have some funding now? Thanks.

It depends... Which land shark were you, Stage left or Stage right?

You actively forget some experiences!

[eionmac]

From my limited 'unkind' interrogations by others, I know I work to actively forget what happened and erase it from the 'mind index' of learned things.

Wait what?

[bobo_1968]

TFT (title) says mice forget as they learn, but TFS makes no mention of this, simply saying that if the main memory pathway is blocked by researchers, then it doesn't get stronger and learning cannot occur. Instead the memory pathway (which is not being activated during recall) weakens. How does this mean that forgetting is happening during learning? TFS literally says the opposite.

Andy Rooney was right

[rwyoder]

I saw him say this on "60 Minutes" years ago: https://books.google.com/books...