You are here

Scientists Want To Edit Your Memories

Scientists working on erasing traumatic memories that can sometimes trigger anxiety or other mental health conditions, have come up with ways to modify, delete, copy and paste other memories into the brain. Scientists assume memory to be transient and a function within the brain’s neurons that can be manipulated through drugs and suggestion therapies. Science Alert reports: In fact, researchers have now figured out how to delete, change, and even implant memories – not just in animals, but in human subjects. And drugs that rewire our brains to forget the bad parts are already on the horizon, as PBS documentary Memory Hackers highlighted over the weekend. If it all sounds a little science fiction, that’s because it is – films such as Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind and Total Recall have long toyed with the idea of altering our memories. But thanks to the advances in neurological scanning technology over the past few decades, we’re now closer than you might realise to making these technologies (or something similar) a reality. So how do you go about deleting a memory? To understand that, you need to understand how memories form and are kept alive in our brains in the first place. [...]