Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hi, brain Stuff, I'm Lauren vogel Bomb, and this is a classic brain Stuff episode. You know, for a show called brain Stuff, we don't spend a whole lot of time talking about the brain. The show got its name because the original host and writer, who you might have heard on earlier episodes, was a guy named Marshall Brain, not
because of any dedication to brain related content. But in this one we get into some strange research being done with snails and memory and transferring memories from one animal to another. Hey, brain stuff, Lauren vogel Bomb. Here, memories are made by experience. For instance, you know that you like donuts because you've had possibly hundreds of delicious donuts in your lifetime. But what if you could have fond memories of donuts, not because you've ever had one before,
but because somebody slipped you a transplanted donut memory. No, Jim Care is not in this movie, and it's not a movie. It's science. A team of researchers at U c l A has been the first to successfully transplant memory from one organism into another. The study published in issue of in euro the online journal of the Society for Neuroscience reports their success in using the genetic molecule ribonucleic acid, or RNA, to transplant a memory from one
marine scale into another. The research team gave the memory donor snails a series of mild electric shocks to their tails over the course of two days. When threatened in this way, the snails retracted the fleshy flaps on the sides of their bodies called parapodia. Afterwards, when the researchers so much as tapped these snails, they withdrew their parapodia four around fifty seconds. And let's be frank here, these c snails are not particularly smart. They don't even have
the type of nervous system that involves a brain. But the trauma of getting repeatedly shocked on the butt led them to become sense tized, which is a simple type of memory. By contrast, a control group of snails that never received the series of shocks only retracted their parapodia for about a second after being tapped by the researchers. And as one of my colleagues would say, here's where
it gets crazy. Next, the sciencests extracted rona from the sensitized snails and injected it into seven snails that had not received shocks. Afterward, when tapped, these snails pulled in their parapodia for an average of forty seconds. David Glandsman, senior author of the study and professor of Integrative biology, Physiology and Neurobiology at U c l A, said in a press release, it's as though we transferred the memory.
The researchers went on to put RNA from shocked snails into petree dishes containing bundles of neurons from snails that had not received the shocks. They found that this resulted in the neurons getting extremely excited when bathed in a chemical messenger that suggested an electric shock. Neurons from the
unsensitized snails did not become near is excited. The research team concluded that this ability from memory to be transferred from one snail to another through r and A suggests that we know less than we think about where memories are stored. It's been assumed until recently that they are kept in synapses, of which each neuron contains thousands A. Glensman said, if memories were stored at synapsies, there's no way Our experiment would have worked. Instead, He suggests they
might be kept in the nucleus of neurons. But this isn't just about annoying snails. The study authors believe this research could soon help patients with Alzheimer's disease or post traumatic stress disorder. Today's episode is based on the article Eternal Sunshine of the Snail Mind on housetof Works dot com, written by Jesselyn Shields. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff works dot Com, and it is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts
from my heart Radio. Visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show.