It’s a well-known coping strategy when you’re feeling down to think back on happy memories. And, according to a new study on mice, recalling positive memories could do even more good than we thought: it might increase long-term resilience to stress even more effectively than actually experiencing a new happy event.
Steve Ramirez and his colleagues at MIT began by creating a happy memory for the mice: researchers let male mice spend some time with a female. A chemical marker, which the researchers had injected into the mice’s brains before the experiment, tagged the specific neurons that activated to store the memory, so that researchers could find them later. One group of the mice then endured ten days of stressful conditions, while the others went about their normal lives in familiar cages. The stressed mice showed signs of depression after their experience: less interest in eating sugar, and a tendency ...
