{"id":231802,"date":"2026-02-21T09:14:20","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T15:14:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/astrocytes-not-just-neurons-found-to-drive-fear-memory-signals-in-the-amygdala"},"modified":"2026-02-21T09:14:20","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T15:14:20","slug":"astrocytes-not-just-neurons-found-to-drive-fear-memory-signals-in-the-amygdala","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/astrocytes-not-just-neurons-found-to-drive-fear-memory-signals-in-the-amygdala","title":{"rendered":"Astrocytes, not just neurons, found to drive fear memory signals in the amygdala"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/astrocytes-not-just-neurons-found-to-drive-fear-memory-signals-in-the-amygdala2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Picture a star-shaped cell in the brain, stretching its spindly arms out to cradle the neurons around it. That\u2019s an astrocyte, and for a long time, scientists thought its job was caretaking the brain, gluing together neurons, and maintaining neural circuits. But now, a new study reveals that these supposed support cells that are spread all over the brain are as important as neurons in fear memory.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAstrocytes are interwoven among neurons in the brain, and it seemed unlikely they were there just for housekeeping. We wanted to understand what they\u2019re actually doing\u2014and how they\u2019re shaping neural activity in the process,\u201d said Lindsay Halladay, assistant professor at the University of Arizona Department of Neuroscience and one of the study\u2019s senior authors.<\/p>\n<p>Halladay\u2019s lab collaborated with researchers from the National Institutes of Health for this multi-institutional study, led by Andrew Holmes and Olena Bukalo of the Laboratory of Behavioral and Genomic Neuroscience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Picture a star-shaped cell in the brain, stretching its spindly arms out to cradle the neurons around it. That\u2019s an astrocyte, and for a long time, scientists thought its job was caretaking the brain, gluing together neurons, and maintaining neural circuits. But now, a new study reveals that these supposed support cells that are spread [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1495,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-231802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231802\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}