Mushroom Memory

Are you any good at putting names to faces? That’s all down to associative memory; the ability to learn and remember relationships between seemingly unrelated items, like a name and a face. Associative memory is vital to adapting to the world around us. Understanding how nerve cells in our brain give us this ability is tricky, which is why researchers look to simpler animal models, like the fruit fly. Here researchers used scanning electron microscopy to image the fruit fly brain, specifically part of a region called the mushroom body, which is involved in associative memory (pictured). Unravelling the network of almost 1000 nerve cells revealed unexpected connections between several different types of nerve cells, highlighted in different colours. This provides new avenues of research into how these surprising connections control associative memory.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Shin-ya Takemura and colleagues
• Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA, USA
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, July 2017