Imagine going to a café you have never been to. You will remember this new environment, but when you visit it again and again fewer new memories about the environment will be formed, only the things that changed will be really memorable. How this long-term memory are regulated is still not fully understood. Ryuichi Shigemoto from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) in cooperation with researchers from Aarhus University and the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Japan now have uncovered a new keystone in the formation of memories.

In their study published in Current Biology, they investigated a signaling path in the hippocampus area of the brain and showed how it controls making new memories about experiencing new environments.

The hippocampus is a central area in the brain that plays an important role in transferring information from the short-term memory to the long-term memory. Of the many interlocking parts of the hippocampus, the researchers focused on the connection between the so-called mossy cells that receive novelty signals of sensory input about the environment and the so-called granule cells to which this information is relayed. In diseases like Alzheimer’s this part of the brain is one of the first ones affected.

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The scientists used four different approaches for this study in order to rigorously investigate these new findings. First, they put the hippocampus under the microscope and studied the structure of how the mossy cells are connected to the granule cells showing their many complex connections.

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