Based on his creation of lesions and the animals’ reaction, he formulated the equipotentiality hypothesis: if part of one area of the brain involved in memory is damaged, another part of the same area can take over that memory function (Lashley, 1950). Lashley did not find evidence of the engram, and the rats were still able to find their way through the maze, regardless of the size or location of the lesion. He did this because he was trying to erase the engram, or the original memory trace that the rats had of the maze. Then, he used the tools available at the time-in this case a soldering iron-to create lesions in the rats’ brains, specifically in the cerebral cortex. First, Lashley (1950) trained rats to find their way through a maze. He was searching for evidence of the engram: the group of neurons that serve as the “physical representation of memory” (Josselyn, 2010).
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