IF YOU are forever forgetting people’s names or family birthdays, take heart. Forming permanent memories is so physiologically expensive it can result in early death – at least for fruit flies.
When fruit flies form lasting memories, their neurons must make new proteins. Now Frederic Mery and Tadeusz Kawecki at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland have shown that this extra work takes its toll on the flies’ ability to survive.
They trained one group of flies to associate a jolt with a bad-smelling mixture of two alcohols, while other flies were subjected either to jolts only or to jolts and…
