Wipe away fearful memories from brain

Tags: memories,wipe,brain
WASHINGTON: And you thought it just happens in sci-fi movies! Scientists have found that newly formed emotional memories can be erased from the human brain, a breakthrough that could lead to new treatments for phobias and post-traumatic stress, with researcher Thomas Agren from Uppsala University leading the research. "The findings may be a breakthrough in research on memory and fear. Ultimately the new findings may lead to improved treatment methods for the millions of people in the world who suffer from anxiety issues like phobias, post-traumatic stress, and panic attacks," said Agren. When a person learns something, a long-term memory is created with the aid of a process of consolidation, which is based on the formation of proteins. As we remember something, the memory becomes unstable for a while and is then restabilized by another consolidation process. In other words, we are not remembering what originally happened, but rather what we remembered the last time we thought about what happened. By disrupting the reconsolidation process that follows upon remembering, we can affect the content of memory. Researchers showed subjects a neutral picture and simultaneously administered an electric shock. In this way the picture came to elicit fear in the subjects which meant a fear memory had been formed. To activate this fear memory, the picture was then shown without any shock. For one experimental group the reconsolidation process was disrupted with the aid of repeated presentations of the picture.