Scientists find and restore lost memories by 'flicking a light switch' in the brain

They can be traumatic, joyful and sometimes hard to remember but memories play a significant role in who we are and how we think. Now, scientists have developed a technique that not only pinpoints memories in the brain, to reveal what they look like, it can be used to restore thoughts that have been lost. The research additionally shows that patients with Alzheimer's may not have problems encoding memories, and instead the fault lies in retrieving the memory instead. This image reveals what a memory looks like. It depicts a memory engram cell (green) in the hippocampal dentate gyrus (DG) region of a mouse brain with symptoms similar to Alzheimer's disease.