A Dutch study succeeded in showing that electroshock, applied immediately after the “reactivation of a memory”, could erase the memory.
In Michel Gondry’s famous film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet choose to have their memories erased in order to forget a too painful separation. If this remains science fiction, researchers have just taken a big step forward in this direction. Indeed, Dutch scientists at Radboud University Nijmegen have successfully erased memories in patients. The ultimate goal is to be able to better treat addictions, depressions and other mental disorders, by erasing bad memories. And these researchers found that by “applying electroshock at the right time, it was possible to target and erase the painful episode from the memory of patients.”
In an article published in the scientific journal Nature, we learn that the strategy of these scientists is based on “the theory of reconsolidation of memory”, which maintains that every time we remember something – that we “reactivate a memory” – it is Then “rewrites” in the circuits of the brain. Animal studies have already shown that during this phase of reconsolidation, memories are vulnerable, which can be altered or even erased.
Electroshock at the right time
To prove this theory, Martin Kroes and his team showed 42 patients, who had been prescribed electroshock due to their severe depressive state, two very anxiety-provoking slideshows (the first showing a car accident, the second a aggression). A week later, the team reactivated the patients’ memories by showing them only one of the two slideshows. Right after, when the reactivated memory is supposed to be the most fragile, the patients received the electroshock. A day later, some of them were asked to recall the two anxiety-provoking stories. They remembered well the slide show they had seen only once, but impossible, on the other hand, to remember the story that was shown to them a second time, just before receiving the electroshocks. For the other group, they were asked about the slideshows but only 90 minutes after treatment, and these patients showed no difference in their ability to remember the two slideshows.
This would therefore tend to prove that the memories can be erased if the electroshocks are applied just after the reactivation of the memory, but that this erasure does not take effect until 24 hours after the treatment. It remains to be seen whether the memory loss is permanent or temporary.
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