A team of scientists has successfully achieved what Christopher Nolan imagined in his 2010 film "Inception," BBC News reported.
The group planted false memories in mice, making them associate a friendly environment with a previous negative experience in a different space.
While it does not fit Nolan's fictional interpretation of dream-manipulation perfectly, the scientists were able to condition a network of neurons to respond to light and cause the mice to recall the negative environment.
Published in the journal Science, the genetically engineered mice's brains were implanted with optic fibers to send bursts of light to the brain. Optogenetics, as it is referred to, is a technique for making individual neurons respond to light.
Dr. Xu Liu and his team of scientists said the research could one day provide insight to how humans produce false memories themselves. In studies conducted in the 70's as to how eyewitnesses remembered events, the results showed that just the way a question was asked had the potential to alter a person's recollection of the event.
Recalling memories, Liu said, is similar to piecing together a puzzle or assembling letters to make a word.
"In the English language there are only 26 letters, but the combinations of letters make unlimited words and sentences, this is also true for memories," Liu told BBC News. "There are so many brain cells and for each individual memory, different combinations of small populations of cells are activated."
Graduate student Steve Ramirez, of the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics in Cambridge, Mass and his colleagues, led by Susumu Tonegawa, noted that the method for humans would not involve fiber optics. However, it could include some type of drug-induced trigger, similar to "Inception."
"Here, we were trying to artificially make an association between the light-reactivated memory and the foot shocks," Ramirez said. We were just trying to artificially connect the two."
