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Feb 20, 2019

Researchers peer inside the mind of the worm for clues on how memories form

Posted by in category: biological

Try as you might, some events cannot be remembered. Known in psychology as memory blocking, the phenomenon has remained elusive since first described more than half a century ago. Now Donnelly Centre researchers have found that blocking is not due to problems with forming memories, as previously thought, but with memory recall—in worms at least.

By studying this process in the C. elegans worm, a creature only one millimeter long but whose biology has been studied so extensively that the position of all of its 302 in the body is known, the researchers think they’ll be able to pinpoint the cells and molecules at play during learning and memory.

The findings are described in a study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

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