Yiu and Ramirez

Both of the papers this week shed light on an interesting topic in the realm of neuroscience and fear memory formation. The Yiu et al paper focuses on the specific neurons that are allocated for the formation and endurance of a fear memory, and went into great depth about the different ways to excite a neuron in order for it to be preferentially allocated in a fear memory. By exciting a neuron using CREB, this neuron will have an advantage at being selected in the fear memory trace. I was impressed with this paper because they did so many different experiments to make their point about the importance of the neuron's potential excitability in the formation of a fear memory. I was wondering why they didn't decide to focus more on inhibiting the endurance of a fear memory, however, because I believe this could be very useful in treating PTSD. If there was a way to optogenetically inhibit (instead of stimulate) the neurons involved in fear memory duration, certain fearful memories of PTSD patients could potentially be abolished altogether in the long run.

In the other paper by Ramirez et al, I was particularly interested in the fact that they were able to create a fear memory in a context in which there was no fear conditioning actually taking place simply by optogenetically stimulating certain neurons that are involved in contextual fear. Once again I had to wonder why this paper also focused on producing a fear memory, since I cannot see this being applicable in a clinical sense. Why would anyone want to create a false fear memory in a human? If this technique could be used to figure out which neurons are involved in a happy memory and stimulate those specific neurons, I could see this paper being extremely useful in the future.

All in all I was more swayed by the Yiu et al paper due to the immense amount of data figures and experiments they ran in order to prove their point.