Scientists May Have Found a Way to Erase Bad Memories

And no, it's not being marketed as a way to forget your stupid ex boyfriends.


Remember that time you bombed a work presentation, fell on your face in public, and got your period at literally the worst moment ever? Well, don't you wish you didn't? In an intriguing new study published in the journal Nature, researchers were able to manipulate bad memories in the minds of mice so that they didn't freak them out as much.

But before you worry about our lives becoming like the plot of a strange sci-fi flick, let us explain. The researchers put male mice in situations where they formed either good or bad memories (in this case, they had good memories of a room where they were exposed to a female mouse and had bad memories of a room where they received a foot shock). Then the scientists were able to locate memory neurons in the brains of these mice that were specifically associated with those memories.

Later, they used lasers to shine a light on certain locations in the brain, which would activate a specific memory—either good or bad. But here's the crazy part: They could manipulate the memory by shining the light on those specific neurons while exposing them to something new to override that memory. So the rats who initially received a foot shock were primed to remember that bad experience at the same moment that they were exposed to something much more positive—like female mice. Experiencing this good thing (female mice) at the same time they were remembering the bad thing (the foot shock), was enough to turn that negative memory into a positive one.

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"The example I give is that restaurant you’ve always liked—the food is great and you have great memories of you and your parents going there," says study coauthor Roger Redondo, Ph.D., neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Then if your partner breaks up with you in that restaurant, in the future whenever anybody mentions that restaurant you'll still remember everything as the same but the emotion it brings on to you is quite different. That happens naturally in the brain as it connects the location with the emotion that responds. We've been able to go in the brain, find out which circuits do this, and we've even caused the brain to do this artificially."

But let's remember that this was still an animal study. "The technology we used cannot be used as it was in humans," says Redondo. "But the value of this finding is that it's possible to show the world where that plasticity is and be inspired to find the proper tools that may work in humans someday."

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That said, those tools will not be used to help you erase the memory of getting dumped at a certain restaurant. "Bad memories are a good thing to have," says Redondo. "Otherwise you may just repeat mistakes. In no way do we envision this as being used in trivial ways to forget a former boyfriend or girlfriend." Instead, he and other authors can see this being a valuable tool in the treatment of anxiety or panic disorders, PTSD, or depression. "Situations where emotions are too strongly associated with certain cues or triggers in the sense that the human experiences that and it's overwhelming and incapacitating." In that respect, a technology such as this may be able to minimize the strength of these emotional associations.

So what can you do with all those less-debilitating-but-still-sucky bad memories floating around in your head? Don't forget them. We all make mistakes, and luckily, we usually learn a lot from them

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