“The 2026 Medicine Nobel And The Light That Switches On A Memory”, Swarajya, 06 Oct 2026.
“On 5 October, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm named Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel of Germany and Karl Deisseroth of the United States as this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
The three share the prize “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics”. Their work, which began with a single-celled green alga, produced a method that lets scientists switch chosen brain cells on and off with flashes of light. Researchers have since used it to study how the brain stores memories, a question that goes back more than a century.
We all know memories have very physical effects on us. Some memories make us happy. Some memories make us freeze. A memory can cause pleasure and another pain.
Where then is the physical imprint of a memory?
It is 120 years since German evolutionary biologist Richard Semon had coined the term ‘engram’ to denote the elusive physical substrate where specific memories are stored…………”
Read the full article at Swarajya.
