'Teleportation' of Rats Sheds Light On How the Memory Is Organized

ScienceDaily (Sep. 28, 2011) — You're rudely awakened by the phone. Your room is pitch black. It's unsettling, because you're a little uncertain about where you are -- and then you remember. You're in a hotel room. Sound like a familiar experience? Or maybe you've felt a similar kind of disorientation when you walk out of an elevator onto the wrong floor? But what actually happens inside your head when you experience moments like these?

In an article published in this week's edition of the journal Nature, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience describe exactly how the brain reacts in situations like these, during the transition between one memory and the next. The study employed a method that allowed them to make measurements right down to the millisecond level. The research was conducted in the laboratory of May-Britt and Edvard Moser, co-director and director respectively of NTNU's Kavli Institute, by first author Karel Jezek.

Their findings show that memory is divided into discrete individual packets, analogous to the way that light is divvied up into individual bits called quanta. Each memory is just 125 milliseconds long -- which means the brain can swap between different memories as often as eight times in one second.

"The brain won't let itself get confused," says Professor May-Britt Moser. "It never mixes different places and memories together, even though you might perceive it that way. This is because the processes taking place inside your head when your brain is looking for a map of where you are take place so fast that you don't notice that you are actually switching between different maps. When you feel a little confused, it is because there is a competition in your brain between two memories. Or maybe more than two."

Beam me up, Scotty
Brain researchers Edvard and May-Britt Moser are trying to understand exactly how the brain works. Their approach is to meticulously monitor electrical activity in different parts of the rat brain, while the rats explore different mazes. It's a painstaking approach that provides them ever more pieces to the puzzle that is the workings of the brain.

To explore the question of whether the brain mixes memories together, the researchers created a special box for their laboratory animals that effectively enabled them to instantaneously 'teleport' a rat from one place to another -- without the help of the Starship Enterprise. Then, they tested how the brain handled the memory of place when the experience of that place suddenly changed from one location to another.

"We tricked the rats," May-Britt Moser explains. "They're not really teleported of course, but we have an approach that makes them believe that they have been. The features of the box, which give the rats a sense of where they are, are actually 'constructed' out of different lighting schemes. So we can switch from one group of location characteristics to another with the flick of a light switch."

read more at link http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110928131800.htm

ScienceDaily (Apr. 4, 2007) — American and French CNRS scientists have shown that a memory of a traumatic event can be wiped out, although other, associated recollections remain intact. This is what a scientist in the Laboratory for the Neurobiology of Learning, Memory and Communication (CNRS/Orsay University), working with an American team, has recently demonstrated in the rat. This result could be used to cure patients suffering from post-traumatic stress.

read more at link above...

I heard about some cruel and unusual hospital employees who put a lab-rat in the hospital tube system (for transporting small items) and 'teleported' the rat throughout the hospital at breakneck speeds!

teleported or transported Oxy?

Teleportation pertains to the transfer of matter from one point to another without traversing the physical space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation - Quantum teleportation, or entanglement-assisted teleportation