Similar to squirrels, black-capped chickadees have a remarkable ability to hide and remember where they store their food. These tiny birds stash thousands of treats in various nooks and crannies in tree bark. Each time a chickadee revisits a food cache, specific nerve cells in their brain’s memory center light up with activity, creating a unique neural pattern. This intricate memory system is a fascinating subject for researchers, as it offers insights into how animals form and recall memories. Chickadees’ precise behavior makes them ideal study subjects, as each caching event represents a distinct moment stored in the hippocampus, a crucial brain structure for memory formation.
To investigate the birds’ episodic memory, neuroscientist Selmaan Chettih and his team at Columbia University designed a specialized arena with 128 artificial storage sites. By implanting probes into the brains of five chickadees, the researchers were able to monitor the electrical activity of individual neurons while the birds were caching and retrieving seeds. They discovered that a specific subset of neurons, comprising only 7 percent or less of the hippocampus, would briefly activate during these tasks. Each food cache had its own unique neural code, indicating a sophisticated memory system at work in these clever birds.
2024-03-29 10:00:00
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