The most important thing about QIH, though, is that it can be switched on and off at will. In Tanaka’s experiments the mice spent 48 hours in the hibernation-like state and then woke up.
For their synapses, these 48 hours worked like Thanos’ snap.
Synaptic purge
To find out how many synapses are lost during QIH, Tanaka’s team implanted tetrodes, bundles of fine electrodes, into the hippocampus of freely moving mice. These let them record individual neurons firing. They found that activity dropped by about 70 percent once hibernation set in.
The brain tissues of some animals were imaged with a technique called serial block-face scanning electron microscopy before
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