Science fiction becomes reality: Researchers 'transfer memories' between animals

It is a nightmarish science fiction scenario, in which two people's memories can be swapped between their brains. But fiction has become reality, after neuroscientists were able to transfer a memory from one animal into another. The memory was the recollection of being given a mild electric shock, in sea slugs zapped repeatedly for two days. When material from their brains was transferred into sea slugs which had never been shocked in their lives, they reacted exactly the same way to the weak touch of a wire. The results suggest that memories can be physically transferred by injection, and follow claims from similar experiments in the 1960s that this could lead to'memory pills' or jabs in the future.