OCTOBER 31, 2008
Erasure
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 PAPER |
In a twist that wouldn’t be out of place in a Charlie
Kaufman film, scientists from Georgia and China have announced that they’re now able to erase specific memories from the mind.
How’d they do it? By overactivating an enzyme in the brains of laboratory mice at the precise moment that memories of especially painful stimuli were recalled, the researchers were able to delete those memories — just as if they were expunging files from a hard drive. Will human heartbreaks be so easy to erase? There are no current plans to create an actual instant-amnesia pill, but scientists do hope to find treatments for illnesses like PTSD, which revolve around the triggering of memories that patients would sooner forget.
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the memory-erasure paper
