World News | Health – Fear Memories – Forming, Storing and Recalling What Are Distant Fear Memories? How are they stored and retrieved?

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 24 (PTI) — Distant fear memories formed in the distant past are permanently stored in connections between memory neurons in the prefrontal cortex, or PFC, according to a mouse study.

But what are distant fear memories?

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A distant fear memory is a memory of a traumatic event that happened in the distant past—months to decades ago.

“It is the prefrontal cortex memory circuits that are gradually strengthened after traumatic events, and this strengthening plays a key role in how fear memories mature into stable forms in the cerebral cortex for permanent storage,” explained lead researcher Jun-Hyeong Cho.

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How are distant fear memories stored and retrieved?

According to UC Riverside research, the brain uses different mechanisms to store recent and distant fear memories. Previous research has shown that while the hippocampus is involved in the initial formation of a fear memory, it matures over time and becomes less dependent on the hippocampus.

The researchers focused on the PFC, a part of the cerebral cortex that has been linked to long-range memory consolidation in previous studies.

“We found that a small population of nerve cells, or neurons, within the PFC, called memory neurons, was active during the initial traumatic event and was reactivated during recall of a remote fear memory,” Cho said.

Can we prevent the recall of these distant fear memories?

“When we selectively inhibited these memory neurons in the PFC, it prevented the mice from recalling distant but not recent fear memories, suggesting that PFC memory neurons play a key role in recalling distant fear memories,” Cho explained.

“Interestingly, the disappearance of the distant fear memory weakened the prefrontal memory circuits that were previously strengthened to store the distant fear memory,” Cho said.

“Furthermore, other operations that prevented the enhancement of the PFC memory circuit also prevented the recall of the remote fear memory,” Cho said.

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