Scientists are now able to directly influence the memory of fruit flies, thanks to new Oxford research conducted into optogenetics and memory.
A team of Oxford University-led scientists was able to make flies improve their actions in response to a mistake they had never actually made. They did this by firing laser light at just twelve out of over 100,000 neurons in the brain of the fly, making it believe it was doing something wrong.
This experiment has ramifications for understanding how memory works in humans. The scientists hope that “the storage of memories from brain cells in flies [will] tell us a lot about how they are stored in human’s,” thus fuelling yet more research in the field.
