Can We Edit Our Memories?

Modern-day neuroscience can't competently interfere with conscious memory; these processes are much too refined, and our understanding of them much too clumsy, for that. But Joseph LeDoux, director of New York University's Center for Neuroscience, has discovered a possible workaround: because memory retrieval alters the content of memories themselves, blocking protein synthesis of traumatic memories while they are being recalled can dull emotional responses to them to the point where it becomes possible to forget, or at least ignore, their content. We can already do this for traumatized rats, and since rats (like humans) have a limbic system that mediates emotional responses to memory, there's good reason to think this approach may also work on humans. Some researchers have even suggested that supervised doses of propranolol (inderal), a beta blocker commonly used to treat heart disease and performance anxiety, can be used to help people achieve enough emotional distance from traumatic memories to forget them entirely. (As someone who takes a fairly large http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2014/04/can-we-edit-our-memories/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=can-we-edit-our-memories

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