How many of us have always wished we could forget something, only to have it keep returning with fresh pain? Well, there may be hope for the hopeless. There may be a drug for you that will help with just that; bad memories. In order to gain new memories, we must delete old ones, says Cornelius Gross of European Molecular Biology Laboratory. And he thinks he knows how to do it.
According to Gross, the brain wants to focus on the important memories, not just the mundane. In order to focus on the important, we must do that, focus on the memories we want. In the journal Nature, Gross and a research team released the data about the brain and the memory process. The hippocampus, known to be that area responsible for short-term memory, is affected each time we retrieve a memory.
This retrieval process and blockage comes from the lesions that are part of this small area in the brain. In order to retrieve memory, we must use this area of our brain. Using it over and over helps us better retrieve certain memories. If you have spent time learning it, the knowledge must be used to be retrieved. So, it stands to reason, if we subject ourselves to bad memories, we strengthen them. This can be a problem, unless you know how to block those unwanted memories from ever surfacing.
Gross and his team think they found a drug that will block those memories. Tested on mice, they found the animal losing all it had learned during the training week. The blocked pathways in the brain stopped the firing of the electrical patterns to the memories. The thought was that the memories would not be accessible, but instead, they disappeared entirely.
The idea is that the lesions on the brain are memories and these memories are blocked, so they are actively forgotten. The drug could provide memory blockage for many learned behaviors and conditions. The idea that memories can be wiped away seems so science fiction instead of science fact.
The drug must be administered while actively thinking about the incident, and then, the wiping starts. The individual would be stimulated to start thinking about the memory, then have the drug introduced into their system. It would then, in effect, block the memory so there is no memory no more. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) would in effect be wiped out as well. No more bad memories or bad cravings.
Why would we need this? This type of drug could help us keep the memories worth keeping, and lose the one’s that hinder us. If the drug really works, and trials come to fruition, then serious brain issues like PTSD can be a thing of the past. Some mental issues are more than just therapy, and if the drug works, then the answer is closer than we think.
The answer may not be the drug alone, but if there was ever a drug that could produce a miracle, this may be it.