Apr 1
Biology Seminar: Matt Lattal, "The behavioral epigenetics of long-term memory formation and erasure"
Understanding basic mechanisms of long-term memory is important for understanding basic brain function associated with everyday human behavior. In some cases, especially salient memories can become associated with psychiatric disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction. In these cases, there is a debilitating inability to inhibit these powerful memories, causing stress and anxiety (in the case of PTSD) or cravings and relapse (in the case of addiction). The treatment challenge for these disorders is to develop interventions that can modulate, suppress, or even erase these powerful memories. I will talk about this memory problem and how behavioral approaches coupled with pharmacological approaches that target specific epigenetic mechanisms may lead to long-lasting changes in memory.