Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone! I hope you all have a great new year :) I thought it would be fun to share my top 5 coolest studies of 2018 to round out the year! This is not a list of the ‘best’ studies of the year, as that is extremely hard to quantify (although all these are pretty stellar), so they are in no particular order. This is simply a list of papers that I thought tackled some interesting problems in a novel or unique way that made me think ‘damn that’s cool’. I hope you enjoy checking them out as much as I did! Click the paper titles for direct access to them.

The phenomenon of “infantile amnesia”, where memories from early life are rapidly lost during development, has been known for quite some time. For example, almost no one has clear memories from when they were very little (e.g., 2 years old). Is this due to a problem in memory storage at this time…or are the memories stored properly, and we just can’t ‘retrieve’ them once we are adults? To investigate this question Guskjolen & colleagues used a transgenic approach to ‘optogenetically tag’ hippocampal neurons activated during the formation of an early fear memory in mice. Then, once the mice had grown up and ‘forgotten the fearful memory’, they reactivated those cells to see if they could ‘recover’ the lost memory. Indeed, they were able to do so suggesting that infantile amnesia is likely a result of retrieval failure rather than storage failure.