"It's a dramatic difference from a healthy dentate gyrus." Some cells die, some new neurons and new connections between neurons are added in the wrong places" Madar says. "In epilepsy, there is this huge rewiring of the dentate gyrus. Researchers like Madar suspected the dentate gyrus helps to discriminate between similar memories, withholding all but the appropriate patterns to prevent confusion. The unique features of each memory may be subtle-from the specific art you admired, different friends along for the experience or even the time of day-but they are important for guiding specific recollections. Another, similar pattern is going to represent the second time you went to the museum." "One pattern represents the first time you visited an art museum. "You can think of each pattern as representing one memory," says Antoine Madar, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, who conducted the research while earning his doctorate at UW–Madison in the lab of neuroscience Professor Matt Jones. One part of the temporal lobe, called the dentate gyrus, has long been suspected to work as a gate-helping to manage brain activity by getting choosy about which patterns of brain cells are active and which are silenced. Temporal lobe epilepsy, marked by seizures in the brain's centers for learning and memory, affects more than half of the 3.4 million people in the U.S. The study, published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience, may lead to earlier diagnosis of epilepsy and possibly new ways to treat epilepsy and other disorders that share symptoms, like Alzheimer's disease, traumatic brain injury and autism spectrum disorder.
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