Extinction with false memories?

Although I felt that the Adelaide et al. paper was a more difficult read, being that it was predominantly physiology based rather than behavior based, I found that the types of behaviors discovered to be very interesting. In regards to figure 4, while the CREB factor was able to create a increase in fear memory, there was no connection between the strength and the memory and the resulting anxiety behaviors. It seems that in most of the papers we have read that these things go hand-in-hand: better consolidation of fear, stronger fear induced behavior. To me, I saw this as an opportunity to address the idea that memory consolidation may be able to be separated from the fear connection as a whole. CREB seems to solely affect the memory strength of the fear learning, separately from the fear.

            With Ramirez et al, I noticed that a few of the figures were used in Dr. Shansky’s class, and remembered how interesting this idea was. I particularly liked their use of the fluorescence in figure 3 when looking at the Cfos + cells. Although not significant, it seems that there are some slight differences, particularly in the BLA of natural recall and false recall expression. I wonder if there is typically a disparity between the BLA and CeA since both are usually (as seen by natural recall) “lit up” equally. After reading the paper, I wondered about the applications of this false memory technique for further experiments. Thinking about last weeks extinction papers, I wondered if we could falsely create extinction in animals- perhaps comparing the idea of strong fear conditioned animals to weak and seeing if this neuronal control of false memories is enough to negate those effects. Furthermore, I believe this would be extra interesting since context plays a large role in the extinction recall and this false memory task also is demonstrated in context situations.