If you were given a choice to remove some of the worst memories of your life, would you take it? Would you choose to forget the horrible experiences of your life and the memories associated with them so that you could live a better life? 

That may sound like a hypothetical question but in the not so distant future, it will be a very real one. Scientists are edging closer and closer to give humanity the ability of deleting past memories. 

If you have watched the supernatural drama “The Vampire Diaries”, you probably understand that it is similar to the way vampires in the show are able to make someone forget about something. Only, in real life, no vampires are needed and only a protein-inhibitor will do the job.

First, How Do We Make Memories?

Image: Brain Cells (Neurons)

There are a lot of things that we still do not understand about our own brains but scientists work day and night to change that. One of the things that has puzzled them is how we make and store memories. 

After years of research, we have some understanding about it and we have come to know that the process of creating and recalling memories is an activity that uses our whole brains and involves different circuitry of neurons. 

Basically, when we are creating a memory, any number of neurons can fire up in our brains and it might happen in any pattern. While recalling it later, the same pattern and number of neurons are activated and that’s how we recall that particular memory. 

But memory storage is also an ongoing process. So, whenever we are recalling past memories, we are actually forming new connections and reconstructing those memories. This also results in a slight change of the memories themselves. 

All this is facilitated by specific proteins in the brain. This gave scientists an idea to delete memories. 

Erasing Memories

Since the process of recollection makes use of specific proteins, scientists theorised that using protein inhibitors should be able to stop the recalling process. They tested this theory in fish and mice and turns out, they were able to erase their memories. 

The experiment with mice should clear things up as to how they made this possible. They placed mice in a chamber and played a specific tone before shocking them. They repeated it until mice started associating the tone with an electric shock. 

Later, whenever the tone was played, the mice would get stressed as they ‘remembered’ that a shock was to follow. This means they had successfully created a memory in the mice. Now it was time to delete it. 

For this, they now played the tone but administered the protein inhibitors in the mice and to their amazement, the mice showed no signs of fear. They had successfully deleted the memories of the mice. 

Implications for Humans

Human trials are still a ways off but if this is able to be adapted for us, it would be a huge deal for the field of medicine. It could be used for post traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) to help patients forget about the haunting memories. Also, it could be very useful to treat addicts by removing their memories of addiction.

In a more distant future, maybe it will be available to anyone wishing to forget any particular memories of their lives to deal with their emotions and feelings associated with those memories. There would be laws regarding this of course but this could very happen.

The future gets stranger by the day.

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