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Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

Preprint fulltext: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.03.409813v2.... "Remembering immunity: Neuronal ensembles in the insular cortex encode and retrieve specific immune responses", Koren et al 2020

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People who have more background than me: What does this have to do with memory and recall of immune responses?

So they infected a mouse, monitored the mouse’s neurons to see which ones are active during inflammation, then waited a while, then hit those neurons again and observed inflammation even though there’s no disease the second time.

If they hit the “same” neurons in a mouse that never had the disease in its lifetime, wouldn’t they observe inflammation without memory? (I don’t think they tried it)

That’s a really good question. I didn’t read the full paper yet, but I think one of the important discoveries here is that there’s a direct causal relationship from brain->immune system in the first place that would allow them to trigger specific responses.

It’s also probably hard to target those same specific neurons without first triggering the immune response since that’s part of their method for finding them.

The prevailing knowledge about the immune system says that immune responses are stored in T-cell reservoirs, not in the brain, and that immune cells are produced autonomously from the bone marrow in response to immune cell activity in the body. The brain doesn't inform or control this system.

This research seems to indicate that not only are specific immune responses stored in some area of the brain, the brain can trigger such a response by itself.

(I'm not a biologist or MD, though)

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