Scientists have captured the brain making memories for the first time

A team of USC researchers has filmed the live brains of zebrafish to show how the brain processes and stores memories in a ground-breaking study which could offer hope for new PTSD treatments. With the help of a tailor made microscope, researchers were able to record how brain cells of the fish - which are transparent when young - 'lit up like Times Square on New Year's Eve' during the experiment. The study, which mapped the changes in the brain, made the surprising find that making memories appears to create new synapses - connections between neurons -or made them disappear entirely. The widely accepted theory that learning and memories strengthen synapses was not apparent. 'For the last 40 years the common wisdom was that you learn by changing the strength of the synapses but that's not what we found in this case,' co-author, director of the Informatics Division at the USC Information Sciences Institute and computer scientist Prof. Carl Kesselman said in a press release.