Cairo: Mai Kamal El-Din
Hervé Poirier, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon, tells us about a completely astonishing discovery… A dizzying neuro-genetic process.
franceinfo: It is by breaking our DNA that memories are engraved in the brain. Explain to us.
Hervé Poirier: L’experiment was carried out by American biologists on mice, which were trained to associate a very particular place with a small electric shock, so that when they were later reintroduced to that place, they remembered it and were afraid. Well it’s very surprising, yes.
Analysis of the hippocampus of these mice, the key area of their memory, demonstrates that during this somewhat unpleasant learning, the double strand of DNA hidden at the heart of the neurons involved breaks into multiple pieces. Faced with all these pieces of DNA wandering around, neurons activate and an inflammatory response is triggered to repair everything.The scene repeats itself during learning.
And this cycle of genetic damage and repair allows memories to form and last. And it would be the very way in which DNA breaks, which would encode the information to be memorized, the researchers suggest… In short, to memorize something well, you have to break your DNA! Staggering.