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A flash of laser light can alter the brains of fruit flies so that they learn to fear pain that they never actually felt.
Gero Miesenböck at the University of Oxford and his colleagues genetically engineered fruit flies so that a handful of their nerve cells fired when lit up with a laser.
This allowed them to write false pain "memories" into the fruit flies’ brains. "These memories cause a lasting modification of the flies’ behaviour," says Miesenböck.
It is known that the release of (...)