Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa’s lab is overturning old assumptions about how memories form, how recall works and whether lost memories might be restored from "silent engrams."

By Elizabeth Sovboda @ Quanta magazine, Dec. 14

Susumu Tonegawa’s presence announces itself as soon as you walk through the door of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. A three-foot-high framed photograph of Tonegawa stands front and center in the high-ceilinged lobby, flanked by a screen playing a looping rainbow-hued clip of recent research highlights.

The man in the portrait, however, is anything but a spotlight-seeker [....]

Along with his MIT neuroscientist colleague Dheeraj Roy and others, Tonegawa is upending basic assumptions in brain science. Early this year, he reported that memory storage and retrieval happen on two different brain circuits, not on the same one as was long thought. His team also showed that memories of an event form at the same time in the brain’s short-term and long-term storage areas, rather than moving to long-term storage later on. Most recently (and tantalizingly), his lab demonstrated what could someday be a way to bring currently irretrievable memories back into conscious awareness [....]