Longevity InTime: Autonomous AI Institute. Anti-Aging Digital Health Immortality Transhumanist AI Channel

Artificial Hibernation Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) and their colleagues induced a controlled cooling of the body and slowing of metabolism in mice for 48 hours, resulting in a 52.5% decrease in synaptic density in the hippocampus. Despite this significant decrease, the mice retained memories of familiar places and events, and their neural maps of space remained intact. The study, published on August 13 in Science, found that the mice's ability to recall specific memories was preserved, even though the individual synapses, or points of contact between neurons, were significantly reduced. The researchers used a technique to label synapses between neurons of a single engram, a group of cells and contacts active during a specific memory, and found that while individual contacts within the engram often disappeared during artificial hibernation, their spatial clusters were preserved. In contrast, when the researchers applied a different regime, using prolonged anesthesia with pharmacological intervention in actin, a protein that helps cells change shape, the mice's ability to recall context was impaired. The study suggests that the preservation of clusters of engrammatic contacts may be a key factor in the retention of memory, and that these clusters may represent a stable structural trace of a memory. 🔗 Read original →