ASEAN diplomats explore Quzhou’s successful efforts in modernizing ancient heritage

In his report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, proposed to comprehensively advance the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts through a Chinese path to modernization - the modernization of a huge population, of common prosperity for all, of material and cultural-ethical advancement, of harmony between humanity and nature, and of peaceful development.

For a long time, the Western perspective has dominated the narrative on modernization. However, China's extraordinary achievements in all aspects demonstrate that there are alternative methods to modernization. The Chinese modernization is a new model for human advancement, and dispels the myth that "modernization is equal to Westernization," presents another picture of modernization, expands the channels for developing countries to achieve modernization, and provides a Chinese solution to aid the exploration of a better social system for humanity.

To understand the Chinese path to modernization, the Global Times is launching a new series that explores how expatriates perceive Chinese modernization through on-site experiences in the country. In this installment, the Global Times follow diplomats from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-China Centre (ACC) and ASEAN member states on their to visit Quzhou in East China's Zhejiang Province, to understand how they perceive the practice of Chinese modernization as seen in the city.

Quzhou, located in East China's Zhejiang Province, is the second hometown of the direct descendants of great Chinese philosopher and educator Confucius (551-479 BC). The city not only boasts beautiful natural scenery and profound cultural heritage, but has also made remarkable use of its heritage to boost modernization and, step by step, realize a futuristic vision, with its ancient wisdom as a cultural calling card and culture brand for a modernized Quzhou.

In preparation for the celebration of the ASEAN-China Year of People-to-people Exchanges in 2024, the School of Government and Public Affairs at the Communication University of China (CUC) in Beijing held the Decoding Chinese Path to Modernization Workshop Series, with some diplomats from the ACC and five ASEAN member states in attendance and taking part in a visit to Quzhou from October 26 to 28 to witness local experiences in Chinese modernization and draw inspiration for the development of ASEAN member states.     

As China and ASEAN member states are close neighbors connected geographically and culturally, these successful experiences hold more significance as references for developing countries in Southeast Asia, experts and diplomats hailed.    

Ancient vs Modern 

The first evidence of Quzhou's success in historical culture-modernization integration is the figures and logos of nankong yeye (Grandpa Confucius), a cute and vivid cartoon figure based on Confucius that can be seen everywhere, from the airport and schools to the city's streets and shopping centers. 

The figure is not only a reappearance of the great philosopher, but also a testament to the enduring spirit and legacy of Confucianism is in all aspects of daily life in the city. 

Visiting team diplomats gained a deeper understanding of this after touring Confucius Ancestral Temple, which is one of the only two Confucius family temples left in China, and is known as the Nanzong Confucius Temple (the Southern Temple).

"The main purpose of our visit here is to learn from Quzhou city, especially on how to preserve culture, but at the same time to pursue development and modernization in China. I think we have learned a lot from how Quzhou city preserves its culture and heritage of Confucianism. We also learned how the Confucius family migrated from the northern part of China to the south. It's very interesting and I think we can follow or at least learn how a city preserved its culture while still modernizing," Director Hadi Tjahjono of Education, Culture, and Tourism Division, from the ACC, told the Global Times.

Many diplomats were also impressed by how the people of Quzhou continue to inherit the ancient Confucian spirit while seeking modern prosperity. 

To the delegation, Quzhou serves as a vivid example of how China is making full use of its existing cultural advantages and advancing modernization through rural development.

Such modernization prioritizes green, peaceful, ecological and people-oriented approaches, different from exploitative, militaristic, and invasive Western strategies aimed at the accumulation of wealth, they said.

A diplomat in the visiting delegation took the Yudong village in Kecheng district as an example to explain her understanding of this perspective. At first, it was a few painting enthusiasts who voluntarily gathered to learn and shared their thoughts on painting in the 1970s. When it comes to the new era of modernization, the local governments did not harshly impede the farmers' creative hobbies, but provide them with support and a stage to shine.

After decades of development under the support of local authorities, now 300 among its 800 residents are skilled at painting and the skill has grown into a comprehensive industry. The village was included by the National Rural Revitalization Administration in a list of national typical cases of characteristic culture and art in March this year.

According to media reports, the collective operating income of the Yudong painting village jumped from about 100,000 yuan ($13,666) in 2019 to 1.12 million yuan in 2022, a significant boost to the local economy. The output value of industries related to farmer painting exceeded 20 million yuan in 2022, helping villagers find jobs close to their homes. In 2019, the output value of industries related to farmer painting was about 8 million yuan.  

The diplomat told the Global Times, on condition of anonymity, that she was impressed by a sentence on a Yudong village wall, which says: "Culture is also a source of growth and productivity; it is capable of driving the masses toward prosperity." 

The success of Yudong proves this is true, the diplomat said. 

Deeper social transformation 

Quzhou is just one of the many examples demonstrating that urbanization and modernization in China are not only aimed at promoting material changes in cities, but also a deeper social transformation, including cultural and environmental transitions.

"In 2015, I came to Beijing as a member of a delegation. Now, I am working in China and able to witness the changes happening here. For example, in Sanlitun, I see constant and rapid changes every day. As a citizen of one of the ASEAN member states, I am very pleased to see these developments," Seint Shwe Zin, a diplomat from the Embassy of Myanmar in China, said at a seminar held in Beijing before the Quzhou visit.

When I came to China to study Chinese 10 years ago, they gave me a book called "Modern Chinese." From the development of education, we can see modernization via the changes of the use of technology and scientific methods in teaching or learning, as well as the tools used by teachers, Chindavong Xaiyasin, a diplomat from the Embassy of Laos in China, said at the seminar.  

Now living and working in Beijing, Chindavong showed strong interest in how Beijing developed the Liangma River - a small, dirty river where caravans would cleanse and refresh their horses before entering Beijing in the olden times, building the area into the "Seine of Beijing." 

Laos is also facing similar challenges while in the process of developing the capital. I hope we can take the restoration and development of the Liangma River as an example, Chindavong told the Global Times.

ASEAN member states and China should share and learn more from the latter's successful experiences in modernization as China-ASEAN relations mature further and grow close, experts and diplomats agreed.  

Xi congratulates Danish King Frederik X on enthronement

Chinese President Xi Jinping sent congratulations on Sunday to new Danish King Frederik X on his accession to the throne.

Xi said that China-Denmark relations have achieved rapid growth since the establishment of bilateral diplomatic ties 74 years ago, with bountiful cooperation results in various fields and the friendship between the peoples increasingly deepening.

He said he highly regards the development of China-Denmark relations, and is willing to work with King Frederik X to constantly elevate the comprehensive strategic partnership between the two countries, so as to bring more benefits to the two peoples.

Xi also sent regards and blessings to former Danish Queen Margrethe II who announced her abdication on Sunday.

China's State Council studies measures to develop 'silver economy'

China's State Council, the cabinet, on Friday studied policy measures to develop the "silver economy," or the elderly care industry, which is widely expected to account for one-third of China's economy by 2050 given the country's ageing population.

An executive meeting of the State Council noted that developing the silver economy is a crucial measure to actively respond to the aging population and promote high-quality development, and is beneficial both in the short term and in the long run, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

The meeting noted the need to fulfill the government's responsibility of ensuring basic needs and to safeguard the bottom line, strengthen basic livelihood protection for the elderly, and increase the supply of basic public services. It also called for giving the market full play to better meet the multi-level and diverse needs of the elderly, and to jointly promote the development and growth of the silver economy.

The meeting noted that relevant policy measures should be continuously improved to tackle urgent problems such as home care and healthcare for the elderly.

China has been stepping up efforts to develop the silver economy in recent years in an effort to handle the aging population, which has become a hot topic in global headlines.

In February 2022, the State Council issued a plan for the development of the country's elderly care services system during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), which included major goals in various aspects, including expanding the supply of elderly care services and improving the health support mechanism for the elderly.

In May, China released a guideline to build a basic elderly care system by 2025, offering coverage for the entire elderly population, according to Xinhua.

China's elderly population aged 60 and above reached more than 280 million by the end of 2022, accounting for 19.8 percent of the total population, and by 2050, the elderly could account for one-third of China's total population, according to a report in the Economic Daily newspaper.

With the rising elderly population also comes vast potential for the "silver economy." According to the Economic Daily report, the elderly care market could account for one-fifth of China's GDP by 2030 and one-third of China's total GDP by 2050.

A previous report from Fudan University in Shanghai said that the "silver economy" could reach 1.9 trillion yuan by 2035, accounting for 9.6 percent of China's total GDP.

Historical drama ‘Qu Yuan’ to tell story of world-renowned patriotic Chinese poet

The historical drama Qu Yuan will be staged in Shanghai this weekend, telling audiences a story of one of the greatest patriotic poets in ancient China, as well as the splendid early Chinese culture of his time.


The play is based on the life story of Qu Yuan, a statesman and poet of the State of Chu during the Warring States Period (475BC-221BC), today the central and southern areas of China.

Witnessing the fall of Chu's capital, its people's displacement as well as the loss of land, Qu refused to align himself with the corrupt officials or yield to oppressive forces. He eventually drowned himself in the Miluo River in Central China's Hunan Province, completing the magnificent patriotic anthem that he had composed with his own life.

On stage, the story is going to be told using flashbacks, starting with Qu's last days before he drowned himself in despair. This part will be the biggest highlight of the whole play, said the play's director Guo Xiaonan.

"Qu had a great affection for saving humanity. His spiritual realm was far beyond that of ordinary people, which brought him a unique sense of spiritual loneliness," Guo told the Global Times in an exclusive interview on Wednesday.

"Qu also had a deep love for his state. When his ideals and ambitions in life were shattered, he chose to end his life, which I think was not a simple suicide, but a sublimation of his soul," Guo said.

"This spirit has influenced Chinese culture for more than 2,000 years, and also is the strongest part of the play."

Legend has it that after his death, the Chu people were deeply saddened and flocked to the river to pay their respects. China's time-honored Dragon Boat Festival, which falls on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, commemorates Qu.

Qu was listed as one of the world's four literary celebrities by the World Peace Council in 1953, the other three being Francois Rabelais, Nicolaus Copernicus and William Shakespeare. He left many immortal literary works to later generations, such as Chu Ci, or Songs of Chu, and Jiu Ge, or The Nine Songs.

His famous literary works will be presented in the drama to create a strong emotional resonance with the audience.

Guo said he believes one line from Qu's poetry will resonate the most with the audience: "Long as the way is, I will keep on searching high and low." 

This well-known line embodies human being's exploration of the meaning of life, and the great spirit of perseverance and active endeavor, said Guo.

"Qu and his cultural imprint are a precious spiritual wealth not only of the Chinese nation, but also the whole humanity," he noted.

Apart from Qu's life and his spiritual world, the play will also highlight the culture of Qu's homeland Chu, a charming part of early Chinese culture.

According to Guo, the play will showcase lacquerwares and bronze wares of that time through props, lighting and dances, opening a window for the audience to view the representative culture from the 800-year history of Chu.

The play is being produced by the Hubei Changjiang People's Art Theatre and Hubei Sanxia Performance Arts Group. It is scheduled to be staged at Shanghai's Majestic Theatre on Saturday and Sunday night, as a part of the ongoing 22nd China Shanghai International Arts Festival.

This newfound hermit crab finds shelter in corals, not shells

A new species of hermit crab discovered in the shallow waters of southern Japan has been enjoying the perks of living like a peanut worm. Like the worms, the 7- to 8-millimeter-long hermit crab uses corals as a covering, researchers report September 20 in PLOS ONE.

Other kinds of hermit crabs live in coral reefs, but typically move in and out of a series of mollusk shells as the crabs grow. Diogenes heteropsammicola is the first hermit crab known to form a mutually beneficial relationship with two species of mobile corals called walking corals. Unlike more familiar coral species, these walking corals don’t grow in colonies and aren’t attached to the seafloor. Instead, each host coral grows with and around a crab, forming a cavity in the coral skeleton that provides a permanent home for the crustacean. In exchange, the crab helps the coral “walk.”
Walking corals are already known to be in a symbiotic relationship with a different sea creature — flexible, marine peanut worms called sipunculids. A symbiotic shift between such distantly related species as the worms and the crab is rare because organisms in a mutualistic relationship tend to be specialized and completely dependent on one other, says study coauthor Momoko Igawa, an ecologist at Kyoto University in Japan.
But similar to the worms, D. heteropsammicola appears to be well-adapted to live in the corals. Its extra slim body can slip inside the corals’ narrow cavity. And unlike other hermit crabs — whose tails curve to the right to fit into spiral shells — D.heteropsammicola’ s tail is symmetrical and can curl either way, just like the corals’ opening.
“Being able to walk around in something that is going to grow larger as you grow larger, that’s a big plus,” says Jan Pechenik, a biologist at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., who was not involved in the study. A typical hermit crab that can’t find a larger shell to move into “really is in trouble.”

D. heteropsammicola’s relationship with walking corals may begin in a similar way as it does with sipunculan worms, Igawa says. A walking coral larva latches onto a tiny mollusk shell containing a juvenile hermit crab and starts to grow. When the hermit crab outgrows the shell, the crustacean moves into the readily available host coral’s crevice, and the shell remains encapsulated in the coral.

By observing the hermit crab in an aquarium, Igawa and coauthor Makoto Kato, also an ecologist at Kyoto University, determined that the crab provides the corals with the same services as the worms: transportation and preventing the corals from being overturned by currents or buried in sediment.

Igawa hopes to search for this new hermit crab in Indonesia, a region where walking corals are normally found. Plus, because walking coral fossils are easy to come by in Japan, she also wants “to reveal the evolutionary history of the symbioses of walking corals [with] sipunculans and hermit crabs by observing these fossils.”

These spiders may have the world’s fastest body clocks

WASHINGTON, D.C. — If it takes you a while to recover from a few lost hours of sleep, be grateful you aren’t an orb weaver.

Three orb-weaving spiders — Allocyclosa bifurca, Cyclosa turbinata and Gasteracantha cancriformis — may have the shortest natural circadian rhythms discovered in an animal thus far, researchers reported November 12 at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting.

Most animals have natural body clocks that run closer to the 24-hour day-night cycle, plus or minus a couple hours, and light helps reset the body’s timing each day. But the three orb weavers’ body clocks average at about 17.4, 18.5 and 19 hours respectively. This means the crawlers must shift their cycle of activity and inactivity — the spider equivalent of wake and sleep cycles — by about five hours each day to keep up with the normal solar cycle.
“That’s like flying across more than five time zones, and experiencing that much jet lag each day in order to stay synchronized with the typical day-night cycle,” said Darrell Moore, a neurobiologist at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City.

“Circadian clocks actually keep us from going into chaos,” he added. “Theoretically, [the spiders] should not exist.”

For most animals, internal clocks help them perform recurring daily activities, like eat, sleep and hunt, at the most appropriate time of day. Previous studies have shown that animals that are out of sync with the 24-hour solar cycle are usually less likely to produce healthy offspring than those that aren’t.
Moore and his colleagues were surprised to find the short circadian clocks while studying aggression and passivity in an orb weaver. The team was trying to see if there was a circadian component to these predatory and preylike behaviors, when they discovered C. turbinata’s exceptionally short circadian cycles. “I was looking at this thing thinking, ‘That can’t be right,’” said Moore.

To measure spiders’ natural biological clocks without the resetting effect of the sun, the researchers placed 18 species of spiders in constant darkness and monitored their motion. Three orb weaver species in particular had incredibly short cycles of activity and inactivity.

As far as the researchers know, the short cycle does not seem to be a problem for these spiders. In fact, it might even be useful. Short clocks may help these orb weavers avoid becoming the proverbial “worm” to the earliest birds, the researchers hypothesize. Since the spiders become more active at dusk and begin spinning their webs three to five hours before dawn, they can avoid predators that hunt in the day.

Throughout the day, the spiders remain motionless on their web, prepared to pounce on their next meal. By midday, the spiders’ truncated circadian clocks should have reset, sparking a new round of activity. But in the five to seven hours of daylight left, the orb weavers remain inactive. It’s hard to say whether the spiders are actually resting, Moore said. The researchers suspect that light may delay the onset of another short circadian cycle each day, helping the spiders stay synchronized with the 24-hour environmental cycle.

“The method or molecular mechanism will be really fascinating to figure out,” said Sigrid Veasey, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. She is curious to know how the spiders can be so far off from “normal” circadian periods, and still be able to match their activity to the 24-hour light and dark cycle.

Determining the differences between short and normal period clocks in spiders may help researchers find out why and how different circadian clocks are suited to the particular environmental challenges of each species, Moore said.

Blowflies use drool to keep their cool

SAN FRANCISCO — Blowflies don’t sweat, but they have raised cooling by drooling to a high art.

In hot times, sturdy, big-eyed Chrysomya megacephala flies repeatedly release — and then retract — a droplet of saliva, Denis Andrade reported January 4 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. This process isn’t sweating. Blowfly droplets put the cooling power of evaporation to use in a different way, said Andrade, who studies ecology and evolution at the Universidade Estadual Paulista in Rio Claro, Brazil.
As saliva hangs on a fly’s mouthparts, the droplet starts to lose some of its heat to the air around it. When the fly droplet has cooled a bit, the fly then slurps it back in, Andrade and colleagues found. Micro-CT scanning showed the retracted droplet in the fly’s throatlike passage near the animal’s brain. The process eased temperatures in the fly’s body by about four degrees Celsius below ambient temps. That may be preventing dangerous overheating, he proposed. The same droplet seemed to be released, cooled, drawn back in and then released again several times in a row.

Andrade had never seen a report of this saliva droplet in-and-out before he and a colleague noticed it while observing blowfly temperatures for other reasons. But in 2012, Chloé Lahondère and a colleague described how Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes that exude a liquid droplet that dangles and cools, but at the other end of the animals.

Mosquitoes, which let their body temperatures float with that of their environment, can get a heat rush when drinking from warm-blooded mammals. While drinking, the insects release a blood-tinged urine droplet, which dissipates some of the heat. There’s some fluid movement within the droplet, says Lahondère, now at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, but whether any of the liquid gets recaptured by the body the way fly drool is, she can’t say.

Somewhere in the brain is a storage device for memories

People tend to think of memories as deeply personal, ephemeral possessions — snippets of emotions, words, colors and smells stitched into our unique neural tapestries as life goes on. But a strange series of experiments conducted decades ago offered a different, more tangible perspective. The mind-bending results have gained unexpected support from recent studies.

In 1959, James Vernon McConnell, a psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, painstakingly trained small flatworms called planarians to associate a shock with a light. The worms remembered this lesson, later contracting their bodies in response to the light.
One weird and wonderful thing about planarians is that they can regenerate their bodies — including their brains. When the trained flatworms were cut in half, they regrew either a head or a tail, depending on which piece had been lost. Not surprisingly, worms that kept their heads and regrew tails retained the memory of the shock, McConnell found. Astonishingly, so did the worms that grew replacement heads and brains. Somehow, these fully operational, complex arrangements of brand-spanking-new nerve cells had acquired the memory of the painful shock, McConnell reported.

In subsequent experiments, McConnell went even further, attempting to transfer memory from one worm to another. He tried grafting the head of a trained worm onto the tail of an untrained worm, but he couldn’t get the head to stick. He injected trained planarian slurry into untrained worms, but the recipients often exploded. Finally, he ground up bits of the trained planarians and fed them to untrained worms. Sure enough, after their meal, the untrained worms seemed to have traces of the memory — the cannibals recoiled at the light.

The implications were bizarre, and potentially profound: Lurking in that pungent planarian puree must be a substance that allowed animals to literally eat one another’s memories.

These outlandish experiments aimed to answer a question that had been needling scientists for decades: What is the physical basis of memory? Somehow, memories get etched into cells, forming a physical trace that researchers call an “engram.” But the nature of these stable, specific imprints is a mystery.
Today, McConnell’s memory transfer episode has largely faded from scientific conversation. But developmental biologist Michael Levin of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., and a handful of other researchers wonder if McConnell was onto something. They have begun revisiting those historical experiments in the ongoing hunt for the engram.

Applying powerful tools to the engram search, scientists are already challenging some widely held ideas about how memories are stored in the brain. New insights haven’t yet revealed the identity of the physical basis of memory, though. Scientists are chasing a wide range of possibilities. Some ideas are backed by strong evidence; others are still just hunches. In pursuit of the engram, some researchers have even searched for clues in memories that persist in brains that go through massive reorganization.
Synapse skeptics
One of today’s most entrenched explanations puts engrams squarely within the synapses, connections where chemical and electrical messages move between nerve cells, or neurons. These contact points are strengthened when bulges called synaptic boutons grow at the ends of message-sending axons and when hairlike protrusions called spines decorate message-receiving dendrites.

In the 1970s, researchers described evidence that as an animal learned something, these neural connections bulked up, forming more contact points of synaptic boutons and dendritic spines. With stronger connection points, cells could fire in tandem when the memory needed to be recalled. Stronger connections mean stronger memory, as the theory goes.

This process of bulking up, called long-term potentiation, or LTP, was thought to offer an excellent explanation for the physical basis of memory, says David Glanzman, a neuroscientist at UCLA who has studied learning and memory since 1980. “Until a few years ago, I implicitly accepted this model for memory,” he says. “I don’t anymore.”

Glanzman has good reason to be skeptical. In his lab, he studies the sea slug Aplysia, an organism that he first encountered as a postdoctoral student in the Columbia University lab of Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel. When shocked in the tail, these slugs protectively withdraw their siphon and gill. After multiple shocks, the animals become sensitized and withdraw faster. (The distinction between learning and remembering is hazy, so researchers often treat the two as similar actions.)

After neurons in the sea slugs had formed the memory of the shock, the researchers saw stronger synapses between the nerve cells that sense the shock and the ones that command the siphon and gill to move. When the memory was made, the synapse sprouted more message-sending bumps, Glanzman’s team reported in eLife in 2014. And when the memory was weakened with a drug that prevents new proteins from being made, some of these bumps disappeared. “That made perfect sense,” Glanzman says. “We expected the synaptic growth to revert and go back to the original, nonlearned state. And it did.”

But the answer to the next logical question was a curve ball. If the memory was stored in bulked-up synapses, as researchers thought, then the new contact points that appear when a memory is formed should be the same ones that vanish when the memory is subsequently lost, Glanzman reasoned. That’s not what happened — not even close. “We found that it was totally random,” Glanzman says. “Completely random.”
Research from Susumu Tonegawa, a Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist at MIT, turned up a result in mice that was just as startling. His project relies on sophisticated tools, including optogenetics. With this technique, the scientists activated specific memory-storing neurons with light. The researchers call those memory-storing cells “engram cells.”

In a parallel to the sea slug experiment, Tonegawa’s team conditioned mice to fear a particular cage and genetically marked the cells that somehow store that fear memory. After the mice learned the association, the researchers saw more dendritic spines in the neurons that store the memory — evidence of stronger synapses.

When the researchers caused amnesia with a drug, that newly formed synaptic muscle went away. “We wiped out the LTP, completely wiped it out,” says neuroscientist Tomás Ryan, who conducted the study in Tonegawa’s lab and reported the results with Tonegawa and colleagues in 2015 in Science.

And yet the memory wasn’t lost. With laser light, the researchers could still activate the engram cells — and the memory they somehow still held. That means that the memory was stored in something that isn’t related to the strength of the synapses.

The surprising results suggest that researchers may have been sidetracked, focusing too hard on synaptic strength as a memory storage system, says Ryan, now at Trinity College Dublin. “That approach has produced about 12,000 or so papers on the topic, but it hasn’t been very successful in explaining how memory works.”

Silent memories
The finding that memory storage and synaptic strength aren’t always tied together raises an important distinction that may help untangle the research. The cellular machines that are required for calling up memories are not necessarily the same machines that store memories. The search for what stores memories may have been muddled with results on how cells naturally call up memories.

Ryan, Tonegawa and Glanzman all think that LTP, with its bulked-up synapses, is important for retrieving memories, but not the thing that actually stores them. It’s quite possible to have stored memories that aren’t readily accessible, what Glanzman calls “occult memories” and Tonegawa refers to as “silent engrams.” Both think the concept applies more broadly than in just the sea slugs and mice they study.

Glanzman explains the situation by considering a talented violin player. “If you cut off my hands, I’m not able to play the violin,” he says. “But it doesn’t mean that I don’t know how to play the violin.” The analogy is overly simple, he says, “but that’s how I think of synapses. They enable the memory to be expressed, but they are not where the memory is.”

In a paper published last October in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Tonegawa and colleagues created silent engrams of a cage in which mice received a shock. The mice didn’t seem to remember the room paired with the shock, suggesting that the memory was silent. But the memory could be called up after a genetic tweak beefed up synaptic connections by boosting the number of synaptic spines specifically among the neurons that stored the memory.

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Those results add weight to the idea that synaptic strength is crucial for memory recall, but not storage, and they also hint that, somehow, the brain stores many inaccessible memory traces. Tonegawa suspects that these silent engrams are quite common.

Finding and reactivating silent engrams “tells us quite a bit about how memory works,” Tonegawa says. “Memory is not always active for you. You learn it, you store it,” but depending on the context, it might slip quietly into the brain and remain silent, he says. Consider an old memory from high school that suddenly pops up. “Something triggered you to recall — something very specific — and that probably involves the conversion of a silent engram to an active engram,” Tonegawa says.

But engrams, silent or active, must still be holding memory information somehow. Tonegawa thinks that this information is stored not in synapses’ strength, but in synapses’ very existence. When a specific memory is formed, new connections are quickly forged, creating anatomical bridges between constellations of cells, he suspects. “That defines the content of memory,” he says. “That is the substrate.”

These newly formed synapses can then be beefed up, leading to the memory burbling up as an active engram, or pared down and weakened, leading to a silent engram. Tonegawa says this idea requires less energy than the LTP model, which holds that memory storage requires constantly revved up synapses full of numerous contact points. Synapse existence, he argues, can hold memory in a latent, low-maintenance state.
“The brain doesn’t even have to recognize that it’s a memory,” says Ryan, who shares this view. Stored in the anatomy of arrays of neurons, memory is “in the shape of the brain itself,” he says.
A temporary vessel
Tonegawa is confident that the very existence of physical links between neurons stores memories. But other researchers have their own notions.

Back in the 1950s, McConnell suspected that RNA, cellular material that can help carry out genetic instructions but can also carry information itself, might somehow store memories.

This unorthodox idea, that RNA is involved in memory storage, has at least one modern-day supporter in Glanzman, who plans to present preliminary data at a meeting in April that suggest injections of RNA can transfer memory between sea slugs.

Glanzman thinks that RNA is a temporary storage vessel for memories, though. The real engram, he suggests, is the folding pattern of DNA in cells’ nuclei. Changes to how tightly DNA is packed can govern how genes are deployed. Those changes, part of what’s known as the epigenetic code, can be made — and even transferred — by roving RNA molecules, Glanzman argues. He is quick to point out that his idea, memory transfer by RNA, is radical. “I don’t think you could find another card-carrying Ph.D. neuroscientist who believes that.”

Other researchers, including neurobiologist David Sweatt of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, also suspect that long-lasting epigenetic changes to DNA hold memories, an idea Sweatt has been pursuing for 20 years. Because epigenetic changes can be stable, “they possess the unique attribute necessary to contribute to the engram,” he says.

And still more engram ideas abound. Some results suggest that a protein called PKM-zeta, which helps keep synapses strong, preserves memories. Other evidence suggests a role for structures called perineuronal nets, rigid sheaths that wrap around neurons. Holes in these nets allow synapses to peek through, solidifying memories, the reasoning goes (SN: 11/14/15, p. 8). A different line of research focuses on proteins that incite others to misfold and aggregate around synapses, strengthening memories. Levin, at Tufts, has his own take. He thinks that bioelectrical signals, detected by voltage-sensing proteins on the outside of cells, can store memories, though he has no evidence yet.

Beyond the brain
Levin’s work on planarians, reminiscent of McConnell’s cannibal research, may even prod memory researchers to think beyond the brain. Planarians can remember the texture of their terrain, even using a new brain, Levin and Tal Shomrat, now at the Ruppin Academic Center in Mikhmoret, Israel, reported in 2013 in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The fact that memory somehow survived decapitation hints that signals outside of the brain may somehow store memories, even if temporarily.

Memory clues may also come from other animals that undergo extreme brain modification over their lifetimes. As caterpillars transition to moths, their brains change dramatically. But a moth that had learned as a caterpillar to avoid a certain odor paired with a shock holds onto that information, despite having a radically different brain, researchers have found.

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Similar results come from mammals, such as the Arctic ground squirrel, which massively prunes its synaptic connections to save energy during torpor in the winter. Within hours of the squirrel waking up, the pruned synaptic connections grow back. Remarkably, some old memories seem to survive the experience. The squirrels have been shown to remember familiar squirrels, as well as how to perform motor feats such as jumping between boxes and crawling through tubes. Even human babies retain taste and sound memories from their time in the womb, despite a very changed brain.

These extreme cases of memory persistence raise lots of basic questions about the nature of the engram, including whether memories must always be stored in the brain. But it’s important that the engram search isn’t restricted to the most advanced forms of humanlike memory, Levin says. “Memory starts, evolutionarily, very early on,” he says. “Single-celled organisms, bacteria, slime molds, fish, these things all have memory.… They have the ability to alter their future behavior based on what’s happened before.”

The diversity of ideas — and of experimental approaches — highlights just how unsettled the engram question remains. After decades of work, the field is still young. Even if the physical identity of the engram is eventually discovered and universally agreed on, a bigger question still looms, Levin says.

“The whole point of memory is that you should be able to look at the engram and immediately know what it means,” he says. Somehow, the physical message of a memory, in whatever form it ultimately takes, must be translated into the experience of a memory by the brain. But no one has a clue how this occurs.

At a 2016 workshop, a small group of researchers gathered to discuss engram ideas that move beyond synapse strength. “All the rebels came together,” Glanzman says. The two-day debate didn’t settle anything, but it was “very valuable,” says Ryan, who also attended. He coauthored a summary of the discussion that appeared in the May 2017 Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. “Because the mind is part of the natural world, there is no reason to believe that it will be any less tangible and ultimately comprehensible than other components,” Ryan and coauthors optimistically wrote.

For now, the field hasn’t been able to explain memories in tangible terms. But research is moving forward, in part because of its deep implications. The hunt for memories gets at the very nature of identity, Levin says. “What does it mean to be a coherent individual that has a coherent bundle of memories?” The elusive identity of the engram may prove key to answering that question.