A brain scientist explains how humans could be able to erase bad memories within 10 years

A brain scientist explains how humans could be able to erase bad memories within 10 years

Business Insider UK spoke to British neuroscientist Professor Tim Bliss about the likelihood of being able to remove a human's bad memories in the near future. 

Professor Bliss said: "There are certainly studies in mice in which it’s been possible to erase fearful memories and the way that is done is to identify the pathways which are storing the fearful memory.

Then by stimulating down those pathways we actually drive down the efficiency of transmission in those pathways. When you do that in mice or rats then you find that the fearful response can be erased.

Of course, that’s a surgical interventional kind of approach but what’s possible in humans.

I think probably a pharmacological approach will be taken first and there are experiments with groups of humans who have got PTSD, that’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, trying pharmacological approaches to alleviate that disease with I think some success.

I think that’s something which within ten years we probably will have a good handle on."

Produced by Jasper Pickering. Special thanks to Leon Siciliano

 

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