WASHINGTON, D.C — War, pain and other traumatic events can sear themselves into our memories.
Now, a study in rats offers clues to how the brain appears to form those memories. It gets a hand from cells called astrocytes. Scientists used to think these cells only provided food and comfort to more important nerve cells. It now turns out that astrocytes may play a key role in how we learn from tough times.Fear and pain are not pleasant. But they can help us to learn how to anticipate it — or avoid what triggers it — in the future. That’s a benefit. But when an event is truly terrible, such memories can become a source of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
This is a severe condition that can occur after someone has a terrible experience, such as a terrorist attack, kidnapping or battlefield firefight. People with PTSD may become anxious, even when there’s no danger. They also may have flashbacks, where they remember a traumatic event, replaying the details over and over in their mind.
Meghan Jones is a brain scientist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She wants to know where fear crosses the line from learning to trauma. It’s difficult to study memory or PTSD in people. After all, everyone’s experience is different. So Jones and her colleagues work in rats.
To make sure their animals had a powerful bad memory, the scientists gave these rats a short series of foot shocks. These did not injure the animals. Indeed, Jones tested the shocks on herself. They were painful and scary, she recalls — “painful enough to make you curse.”
Rats are no fools when it comes to fear. A week after the first, painful experience, they remained jumpy when given a second, milder shock…
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