Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
Despite how easy movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Men in Black, and Total Recall make it seem, memory manipulation or erasure in humans is still a distant dream in the real world—and for good reason. While many researchers agree it could revolutionize things like PTSD and other mental health treatment—not to mention delete memories of embarrassing and cringe moments in our lives—they are wary of tampering too much. That’s because even our most unpleasant memories can serve important purposes.
“Our memories are what make us who we are,” Sheena Josselyn, a memory and learning researcher at the Josselyn Frankland Lab at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, told The Daily Beast. “And when we start messing with them, without there being a real imperative to do so, I think that we can really mess things up at the societal level. So I think it’s really important that we do these sorts of interventions very sparingly.”
Although we understand very little about how the brain works, research undertaken in the last decade is slowly illuminating the path to understanding how memories form, and how they are stored and retrieved. Studies show it is possible to erase specific memories, create false memories, or reduce the trauma and recall associated with a distressing memory—at least in snails and rodents. While there are currently no drugs or treatments that can achieve memory manipulation in humans, these findings have laid the foundation for future memory manipulation.