You’ve all seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, right? The surreal movie about erasing bad memories? I never really thought it’d be possible to ever actually do that, and I laughed off the parts of the movie where they “localized” bad memories in the brain, clicked on them, and magically erased them. Generally I dislike it whenever people use images from brain scanners in order to give credence to any scientific endeavor to do with the mind, because really, anybody can take a picture of someone’s brain. Nobody knows what is really going on, least of all cognitive neuroscientists who use giant magnets to collect their data without really understanding the physics behind it. But that’s neither here nor there.
Back to my main point of memory erasure!
I saw an interesting talk yesterday by Karim Nader, a research professor at McGill University who used to work at NYU. He and others are carrying out research that will ultimately be helpful to sufferers of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). People with PTSD are crippled by their emotional memories, and have long waited for therapies that work, namely getting rid of unwanted memories. It’s been found that if people reactivate their memories and are given a dose of Propranolol, the emotions associated with that memory are erased, or made less intense, while preserving the objective aspects of the memory. Propranolol is a beta blocker, which blocks the effects of stress hormones (reducing heart rate, perspiration, blood pressure, etc) and works within memory areas of the brain, including the amygdala, a region of the brain important for fear conditioning. So while people will still be able to recall their memories, those memories will no longer be sources of pain. It’s a win-win situation!
It’s amazing to me that this can even work. Like, how do we know people will erase the emotional part of one memory but not another? Once you separate emotion from memory, is it possible for it to come back? What is going on in the brain for this separation to occur? In any case, though there is likely a placebo effect going on for some people, for others it actually does the trick! At least to an extent that the memories are manageable through more traditional forms of therapy.
Propranolol administration is not a sure-fire method at this point, but I am sure with more research we will come to understand emotional memories better. There will also be, undoubtedly, questions of ethics. Should people without PTSD be allowed to use propranolol for things like forgetting the emotions associated with a bad breakup or the death of a family member? Would that even work or does this method only work on seriously debilitating memories that strongly affect our physiology, as in PTSD? Honestly, I haven’t done my homework, but this type of research is certainly interesting and I’ll keep my ears open for new developments.
Link to article on Forbes.com
Link to article on McGill.ca
