Brain research was revolutionized by the famous case of patient H.M., who could not remember any new experiences following brain surgery in 1953. Only a small area of the brain – the hippocampus – is responsible for encoding new impressions in long-term memory. Alessio Attardo, now group leader in the Department of Stress Neurobiology and Neurogenetics at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, showed that dendritic spines and synapses in mouse hippocampus only last as long as it takes to transfer information into long-term memory. For their experiments the scientists developed new microscopy technology and sophisticated mathematical models.
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