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Sun 15 Mar, 2009 09:41 am
Should painful memories be erased?
Quote:Something horrible happens. A child is lost. A bomb goes off. A car goes out of control.
And deep in the brain, in the lateral amygdala region, a scattered set of neurons come to life and begin to vibrate with fear.
Through an ingenious set of experiments, a group of researchers at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children have not only located these terror-laden brain cells in mice, but erased them " along with the frightening memories they stored.
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The study, which appears today in the journal Science, may hold out the hope that terrifying memories one day might be erased before they can fester into such conditions as post-traumatic stress disorder.
While the sights and sounds of a blast or crash would stay intact, the memory of the fear it caused could conceivably be removed, the researchers suggest.
"You wouldn't want to completely get rid of all aspects of a memory," says Dr. Michael Salter, head of the Neurosciences & Mental Health program at the hospital.
"To help people with these kinds of post-traumatic stress disorders ... you might just want to minimize the emotional association between the memory and the highly disruptive and negative emotions that people have in this context."