Let’s have some real talk about mouse nostalgia. Wait what on earth do mice have to be nostalgic about, you may ask? Like, do mice have glory days – maybe harkening back to days of being some big baseball player, back in high school, who could throw a speed ball by you, make you look like a fool?1?
In a study published yesterday in Nature titled “Activating positive memory engrams suppresses depression-like behavior,”2 which Discover Blogs helpfully translates to “Nostalgia for Happy Times Reduces Depression in Mice”, some fine researchers at MIT have apparently shown that not only are mice brains capable of storing happy memories, but that reactivating the parts of the brain that store those happy memories can short circuit depressive behavior.
How exactly does one generate happy memories in mice? Perhaps shower them in gourmet cheeses? A trip to Disney Land? Nope: surprising exactly no one – it’s all about sexytime. The research team provided the test subjects (male mice) a “naturally rewarding experience”, i.e. “exposure to a female mouse in a modified home cage”.3 Yeah we’re picking up what you’re laying down, MIT research team: bow-chica-wow-wow.
The Readers’ Digest version of the whole study:
- Create happy sexytime memories in dude mice
- Subsequently subject said mice to duress to the point that they4 become depressed and totes uninterested in sex
- Make use of some light-therapy voodoo5 to reactivate areas in the brain that were previously lit up like Christmas trees during the initial happy sexytime time6
The upshot of the study results? Artificial reactivation of happy-memory parts of the brain in mice effectively jolts the mice out of their depressive behaviors. As Discover Blogs points out7 – this doesn’t mean that we’ll be fixing depression in humans anytime soon by light-zapping neurons. Certainly though, tangibly connecting positive memories with emergence from a depressive state even in mice is no small thing.
We recommend the MIT team replicate this study with lady mice as the test subjects. Our suggestion for “naturally rewarding experiences” for the lady mice: entirely removing any local dude mice8, providing a nice warm bath, some Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia and season 3 of OITNB queued up on the telly.9
with extreme apologies to The Boss ↩
Steve Ramirez, Xu Liu, Christopher J. MacDonald, Anthony Moffa, Joanne Zhou, Roger L. Redondo, Susumu Tonegawa, “Activating positive memory engrams suppresses depression-like behaviour“, June 18, 2015 (online) ↩
Steve Ramirez, Xu Liu, Christopher J. MacDonald, Anthony Moffa, Joanne Zhou, Roger L. Redondo, Susumu Tonegawa, “Activating positive memory engrams suppresses depression-like behaviour“, June 18, 2015 (online) ↩
the mice, that is; no word on the stress levels or sexual appetites of the research team during this study ↩
not really voodoo, this is straight up SCIENCE people, scout’s honor. ↩
Refer to the study for the nitty-gritty on the actually-really-hella-cool methods used to first mark the neurons involved in the creation of mouse memories and to subsequently “optically reactivate” those neurons ↩
especially the philandering, lecherous ones ↩
You’re free to use that in future study methods, MIT team – no need to credit us! ↩