Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Psicothema. 2022 Aug;34(3):446-453. doi: 10.7334/psicothema2022.66.
Intracranial self-stimulation (ICSS) is a technique by which rats press a lever to stimulate their brains through an electrode chronically implanted in brain reward areas. Currently only two laboratories in the world, one in India and one in Spain, are intensively studying the effect of this kind of deep brain stimulation on learning and memory. This paper will present the main findings.
Different groups of young and old healthy and brain-damaged rats with electrodes implanted in the medial forebrain bundle received a treatment of ICSS after being trained in several paradigms of implicit and explicit learning. Memory was tested over short and long-term periods. Structural and molecular post-mortem analyses of their brains were examined in relation to memory results.
ICSS enhances implicit and explicit memory, especially in animals showing poor performance in the learning tasks, such as brain-damaged subjects. At the structural and molecular level, ICSS enhances size and dendritic arborization and promotes neurogenesis in specific hippocampal areas. ICSS also regulates the expression of genes related to learning and memory.
Through activating reward and neural plasticity mechanisms, ICSS in the medial forebrain bundle is a promising technique for memory-enhancing treatments.
颅内自我刺激（ICSS）是一种技术，通过将电极植入大脑奖励区域，使大鼠通过按压杠杆来刺激大脑。目前，全世界只有两个实验室，一个在印度，一个在西班牙，正在深入研究这种深部脑刺激对学习和记忆的影响。本文将介绍主要发现。
不同组别的年轻和老年健康大鼠和大脑损伤大鼠，在接受内侧前脑束中的电极植入手术后，在几种内隐和外显学习范式中接受 ICSS 治疗。对记忆进行短期和长期测试。对其大脑的结构和分子死后分析与记忆结果相关。
ICSS 增强了内隐和外显记忆，特别是在学习任务中表现不佳的动物，如大脑损伤的动物。在结构和分子水平上，ICSS 增加了特定海马区的大小和树突分支，并促进了神经发生。ICSS 还调节了与学习和记忆相关的基因的表达。
通过激活奖励和神经可塑性机制，内侧前脑束中的 ICSS 是一种有前途的增强记忆治疗技术。
