Is It Possible To Make Bad Memories Disappear?
Everybody has memories they'd like to forget forever. Now, thanks to research conducted by scientists at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, there might be a pill for that. According to their study recently published in Science, it may soon be possible to control fear memories with extinction-based drug therapies. The Researchers studied proteins in mice known as extracellular matrix chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans and discovered that they form 'neural nets' in the brain which protect against the erasure of fear memories. By giving the mice a drug called chondroitinase ABC, the researchers say they were able to degrade these perineuronal nets and render subsequently acquired fear memories susceptible to erasure. read more