A team of researchers were able to implant false memories in the brain of mice in an experiment that they hope will "shed light" on the often disputed fact that people can remember experiences that never existed.

In order to learn how false memories might form in the human brain miroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology encoded memories in the brains of mice by manipulating individual neurons according to The Guardian.

Team leader Susumu Tonagawa described the results of the study in the newest edition of the journal Science.

Tonagawa's team used the otogenetics technique, which allowed them to control individual brain cells. The team engineered brain cells in the mouse hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be involved in forming memories "to express the gene for a protein called channelrhopsin" according to The Guardian.

Memories of experiences are made from a number of different elements like records of space, time, and objects according to Tonagawa.

"Humans are very imaginative animals," said Tonagawa according to The Guardian. "Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain. So, just like our mouse, it is quite possible we can associate what we happen to have in our mind with bad or good high-variance ongoing events. In other words, there could be a false association of what you have in your mind rather than what is happening to you."

The team placed the mice in a chamber and let them "explore," and while they did, relevant memory-encoding brain cells produced the channelrhodopsin protein.

The following day the same mice were put in a second chamber and given a small electric shock, to "encode a fear response" according to the journal. At the same time, the team shinned a light into the brains to activate memories from the first chamber.

This was done so mice learn to associate fear of the electric shock with the memory from the first chamber used according to the journal.

In the last past of the experiment, the team put the mice back in the first chamber. The mice "froze," showing what the team called a typical fear response even though they were shocked in the second chamber.

"Our study showed that the false memory and the genuine memory are based on very similar, almost identical, brain mechanisms. It is difficult for the false memory bearer to distinguish between them," said Tonagawa according to The Guardian. "We hope our future findings along this line will further alert legislatures and legal experts how unreliable memory can be."

Tonagawa has warned people though that it is "far simpler" to create false memories in mice then it would be in humans.

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