Flipping a light switch recovers memories lost to Alzheimer's disease mice

Light stimulation of brain cells can recover memories in mice with Alzheimer's disease-like memory loss, according to new research from the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics. The rescue of memories, which changed both the structure of neurons as well as the behavior of mice, was achieved using optogenetics, a method for manipulating genetically tagged cells with precise bursts of light. This finding suggests that impaired retrieval of memories, rather than poor storage or encoding, ma...