A study claiming that a "memory" could be transferred from one animal to another in form of an injection has caused a lot of excitement. The Futurist said that Scientists Transferred Memories From One Snail to Another. Someday, They Could Do The Same in Humans. But I have to say I'm not convinced. In the paper, published in eNeuro, UCLA researchers Alexis Bédécarrats and collagues report that they extracted RNA from the neurons of sea slugs (Aplysia) after training them to be sensitive to touch. This RNA, when injected into untrained Aplysia, caused them to become sensitized to touch as well, as this key figure shows:
The authors hypothesize that the RNA may have induced epigenetic changes in the neurons of the recipient animals which caused the sensitization. This would be a radically different mechanism of memory to the one accepted by most neuroscientists, which is based on the specific ...
