Yes, the act of testing i.e. "recall" consolidates memory. Recall may take place many times - obviously, later when the mouse returns to the scene. At that po

Yes, the act of testing i.e. "recall" consolidates memory. Recall may take place many times - obviously, later when the mouse returns to the scene. At that point, the memory might be strongly burnt in if the environmental cues are highly salient e.g. food is found, or a predator strikes. Recall consolidation also takes place more mildly in the normal course of resting and sleeping. It is a default system idle process in animals. So, if the mouse visits a new maze, and then later on takes a break to just chill and snooze a bit, or do nothing in the corner of her cage, her system idle process will replay the sense data from the maze experience, consolidating the memories mildly. The article is reporting that the ultra small scale technology required to image where the memories are physically being consolidated in the chromosomes has advanced to a promising point. What is the physical data structure of memory? In computers, it is the silicone, organised into physical bytes. In mammals? The last para of the article is indicative of what the researchers are exploring: “We are currently ignoring 95% of the genome,” Marco said. He was taught to call it junk DNA. But like the enhancers that drive this aspect of memory encoding, the rest of these genes may take on crucial roles as well. “Although we mapped the genome, we still don’t understand most of it,” he said. He is speculating that the data structure for memory storage is the junk DNA which comprises 97% of the human genome. Perhaps proteins surrounding the DNA in the chromosome packaging act as pointers. Perhaps the non-coding DNA can represent data structures such as a body map, or an environmental location map, or a timeline, or a dictionary. The technology will help scientists to identify what the pointers are pointing at. Over time, they hope to make sense of this, in the same way that cryptographers developed Reverse Encryption Algorithms through Shannon's principle of confusion and diffusion.