Soon You Can Wipe Out Your Worst Memories

Based on reporting by the New York Post.

Memories are what make us. It is the memory of the experiences we have had that determines our actions and reactions. But when memories are bad, we become nervous in similar situations — a boy who ate a rotten boiled egg one summer will dislike boiled eggs for years, his brain having linked the food with sickness.

Bad memories give us anxiety. But science may have found a way to dull the emotional edge of those memories without erasing them.

Dutch psychology professor Merel Kindt has seemingly found a way to erase the emotional anxiety associated with bad memories while leaving the memories themselves intact.

Working with arachnophobes, Kindt discovered that subjects given a drug called propranolol after being exposed to a spider were later able to handle the creatures without fear. The drug is believed to change the way a memory — in this case, the terror associated with spiders — is re-saved in the brain after being reactivated.

Propranolol is a beta-blocker: it dampens the effects of norepinephrine, the neurotransmitter that drives the fight-or-flight response. The idea is that by blocking that chemical cascade while a fear memory is briefly reactivated, the memory can be stored again without its emotional charge.

Kindt's team suggested the technique might one day help people with PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder — where reactivated traumatic memories trigger debilitating fear. The pilot study involved only 45 subjects, with larger studies planned.

Source: New York Post