nt of these connections on day one with the same on day four or five, it's very, very different," says Kazumasa Tanaka, a neuroscientist at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan. To learn how a memory that can last for years can sit on hardware that shifts every few days, Tanaka’s team made the shift a bit more dramatic. In a recent Science study, they induced a hibernation-like state in mice, which basically erased the state of more than half of their synapses. And yet the mice apparently have kept their memories.

Hibernation on demand

Hibernation is a specialty of squirrels, hamsters, and bears, but the neural circuit that triggers it is conserved across mammals, and is present in species that never hibernate in the wild—like mice. In June 2020, a team of researchers led by Takeshi Sakurai, a neuroscientist at the University of Tsukuba and a collaborator on Tanaka’s study, developed a technique to artificially activate this hibernation circuit. This can be done by activating a population called Q neurons in a region of the hypothalamus.

Read full article

Comments

28:T42c,{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://nvdium.com/en/articles/112333779#article","url":"https://nvdium.com/en/articles/112333779","headline":"Putting mice into hibernation causes a major loss of synapses","description":"Hibernation cuts down on synapses, but mice seem to retain memories anyway.","datePublished":"2026-08-25T16:57:11.356Z","dateModified":"2026-08-29T02:43:30.88Z","mainEntityOfPage":"https://nvdium.com/en/articles/112333779","isAccessibleForFree":true,"inLanguage":"en","isPartOf":{"