Is there a button in our brain to erase bad memories?

Ulysses was not heard from for many years. He could have died in the Trojan War. His son Telemachus visits Menelaus and his wife Helen in search of information about his father. There he attends a banquet at which Menelaus recalls the exploits of the king of Ithaca.

At this point, visitors fall into a deep sadness, remembering him. But Elena orders the servants to serve nepenthes, a drink of oblivion. “Whoever drinks this drink will calm all his ailments and will be unable to feel sadness, as it makes painful memories forgotten.” It is then that happiness returns to those present.

This is how Homer relates it in Canto IV. Odyssey. But is it really that easy to forget a traumatic memory? Is there any scientific evidence to support this?

Why is it a means to remember the bad?

Our memory stores a lot of what happens to us during the day, but a lot of it is eventually forgotten. However, we do have some capacity to store bad memories, even though it is not a free process: our nervous system needs certain neural circuits to be modified, followed by protein synthesis and cellular energy expenditure.

Curiously, all these memory preservation efforts are bound to leave us with psychological consequences and, in the worst case scenario, give us post-traumatic stress disorder. Why?

Part of the explanation is based on the fact that these negative experiences are closely related to emotions. And our brain categorizes and stores memories based on their usefulness, believing that those associated with emotions are useful for our survival. If we get very frightened while crossing a dangerous area of ​​our city, the brain saves it so that we don’t do it again.

The situation becomes more complicated when the experience is truly traumatic. In this case, our thinking organ tends to hide these experiences, but keeps them unprocessed. As a quick defense mechanism, it’s fine. The problem arises when, for whatever reason, bad memories reappear. Thus, the damage can be very large when dealing with experiences that have been archived. no cooking.

Light and sound to eliminate traumatic experiences

Neurology seems to have found some pieces of the puzzle that can help us. Even the smallest factor can play an important role in determining whether we keep memory or delete it.

For example, light, something so ordinary and affecting us all, also flies(Droshpila melanogaster) able to forget traumatic events when kept in the dark. And all thanks to a protein that acts as a memory modulator and which, and this part we are interested in, is evolutionarily highly conserved. Or, in other words, it is present in all animals, including humans. The explanation may be relatively simple: light acts as a modulator of brain functions, including memory maintenance.

Sounds are another important part, especially when we are sleeping. Sleep is essential for memory processing. During the day our brain install applications (souvenirs) and at night Refresh. Thus, the newly acquired memory will be transformed into long-term memory during the night’s rest.

Following this reasoning, we could also do the opposite: use stimuli, in this case auditory, to delete negative experience, as confirmed by researchers from the University of York (England) in a recent study.

While these types of research are still in the experimental stage, they could be very helpful in developing future therapies that will allow us to attenuate traumatic memories based on auditory stimuli during sleep.

Promising drugs

Some of you may be wondering if you will be selling light or sound pills in the future to help us forget bad memories. We don’t have an answer, but we do have scientific evidence that some existing medications can help erase traumatic memories.

Propranolol, for example, is a drug used to treat high blood pressure and allows experimental animals to forget their trauma. The key may lie in a protein in neurons that determines whether memories need to be altered or not. If this protein is destroyed, memories become modifiable, and if present, they are retained.

Anti-inflammatory drug as a shield against intrusive memories

Despite the fact that these are works performed on experimental animals, they are an excellent model for studying the nervous system. The human brain, while similar, is more complex. Then let’s go to him.

Traumatic experiences are very difficult to forget, and they seriously affect the people who experience them. Researchers at University College London thought the same way, they just published a study describing how hydrocortisone, an anti-inflammatory drug commonly used to treat arthritis, can promote the process of forgetting intrusive memories when taken after a traumatic event.

Interestingly, the effect was different for women and men, depending on the level of sex hormones in their bodies. For example, men with high estrogen levels had fewer traumatic memories. In women, the opposite happened: elevated estrogen levels made them more susceptible to bad memories after hydrocortisone treatment. This shows that the same remedy may have the opposite effect on some people than on others; hence the importance of research from a gender perspective.

Currently, hydrocortisone is only effective when administered in the first hours after injury or before bedtime, when memory is consolidating. However, science continues to advance in hopes of accelerating the natural process of forgetting and limiting long-term psychological stress.

It is true that this type of research has some limitations, for example, how traumatic stimuli are experimentally provoked may not reflect the severity of memories that arise from bad experiences in real life. However, it opens up new possibilities in the study of new treatments for victims of post-traumatic stress. Or maybe even the possibility of erasing bad memories that prevent you from leading a normal life.

We do not know what will happen in the future, but if you are interested, we recommend that you take a look Forget me! (2004). Maybe I’ll find a hint of what’s to come.

José A. Morales Garcia, Professor and Researcher in Neurology at the Complutense University of Madrid.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.

We recommend you METADATA, an RPP technology podcast. News, analytics, reviews, recommendations and everything you need to know about the tech world.