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For those who have ever had terrible experiences in their lives and just want to forget, scientists might soon have the solution. A team of Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and McGill University researchers are working on a new method to manipulate the brain’s functions in order to enable different memory activities. Basically, scientists might soon help people forget or remember as they want.
In the Science Daily article that was published recently, it was noted that it might be possible to someday develop a drug that can help remove or sharpen memories depending on the needs. Such a drug could be particularly helpful to people suffering from PTSD such as war veterans or victims of abuse.
One of the people behind the research is Dr. Samuel Schacher and he provides a scenario that can explain exactly what such a drug can be used for.
"The example I like to give is, if you are walking in a high-crime area and you take a shortcut through a dark alley and get mugged, and then you happen to see a mailbox nearby, you might get really nervous when you want to mail something later on," Dr. Schacher explains.
"One focus of our current research is to develop strategies to eliminate problematic non-associative memories that may become stamped on the brain during a traumatic experience without harming associative memories, which can help people make informed decisions in the future -- like not taking shortcuts through dark alleys in high-crime areas," he adds.
Much of the research surrounding the topic involves Aplysia, which is a type of snail, Futurism reports. The researchers took a pair of sensory neurons from this snail and then paired that with one motor neuron. The motor neuron was then stimulated in order to produce two different scenarios related to memory; one being incidental and the other being non-associative.
Doing so allowed the scientists to discover that something called kinase proteins was responsible for turning these stimulations into memory. Thus, all the scientists need to do is to block these proteins.
