MSU develops brain imaging system to reveal how memories are made, recorded

“We want to know how memories are made and how they fail to be made in people with memory disorders like Alzheimer’s disease,” said Mark Reimers, an associate professor in the College of Natural Science and Institute for Quantitative Health Sciences and Engineering. “We’d like to investigate and track the evolution of a memory over time and even observe how things get mixed up in everyday memory.”

Currently, high-resolution brain imaging techniques can capture only a few hundred individual neurons — the nerve cells that transmit electrical signals throughout the body — at a time. Starting with some initial seed money from the director of IQHSE, Christopher Contag, and MSU’s neuroscience program, Reimers and his co-investigator Christian Burgess at the University of Michigan were able to develop a prototype of the imaging system that has the potential to image 10,000 to 20,000 neurons, giving researchers an unprecedented view of brain activity in real time while it is making and recalling memories. This research has led to a three-year $750,000 grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.