This circuit connects neurons in the hippocampus, which remember the memory’s context (what happened and where it happened), with neurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA), which stores the emotional association of the event. In 2014, Tonegawa’s lab identified a brain circuit that links memories with positive or negative emotions. Joshua Kim, an MIT graduate student, is the paper’s lead author. Tonegawa is the senior author of the study, which appears in the Oct.
“The positive memory cells identified by the genetic markers, which counter negative memory cells, promise an opportunity to identify effective molecular targets for treatment of emotional disorders such as depression and PTSD,” says Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience and director of the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Furthermore, these sets of cells inhibit each other, suggesting that an imbalance between these populations may be responsible for disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Our emotional state is governed partly by a tiny brain structure known as the amygdala, which is responsible for processing positive emotions such as happiness, and negative ones such as fear and anxiety.Ī new study from MIT finds that these emotions are controlled by two populations of neurons that are genetically programmed to encode memories of either fearful or pleasurable events.
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