If the concept of "Inception" seemed rather scary to you, it's about to get worse: scientists in our real world have figured out how to implant false memories.
MIT scientists didn't carry out the procedure on a human (it was on a mouse), but in the process they discovered that false memories neurologically and chemically resemble real memories in the brain.
"Is the information spread out in various parts of the brain, or is there a particular area of the brain in which this type of memory is stored? This has been a very fundamental question," said Susumu Tonegawa, the senior author of the paper detailing the findings in the journal Science.
"Compared to most studies that treat the brain as a black box while trying to access it from the outside in, this is like we are trying to study the brain from the inside out," researcher Xu Liu explained.
The scientists placed a mouse in chamber A, allowing for an episodic memory to develop. The next day, the mouse was placed in a different chamber, and the researchers stimulated the memory traces in the mouse's brain (called engrams) while delivering a shock to the mouse. When the mouse was later placed back in chamber A it expressed fear, believing chamber A to be the location of the shocking experience, despite having been in another chamber when the shock was administered. The scientists had successfully created a fear response based on a memory that never really happened.
"Are there multiple conditions that lead to the formation of false memories? Can false memories for both pleasurable and aversive events be artificially created? What about false memories for more than just contexts — false memories for objects, food or other mice? These are the once seemingly sci-fi questions that can now be experimentally tackled in the lab," said graduate student Steve Ramirez.