快猫短视频

FOR those haunted by thoughts of an accident or ill-fated love affair, erasing these memories might be tempting. This ability could be a step closer after the successful wiping of a painful memory from the minds of mice.

at the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, and colleagues trained mice to have a painful memory by giving them a mild electric shock while placing them in a particular chamber and playing a specific noise. Shortly after boosting levels of the protein alpha-CaMKII, which is involved in memory storage and retrieval, the mice were returned to the chamber and replayed the noise.

Giving this extra alpha-CaMKII at the same time as exposing the mice to the chamber and noise seemed to wipe away the association between these things and pain. When the mice were returned to the chamber at a later point and played the sound, they remained calm, while mice that had not had their alpha-CaMKII levels boosted froze in fear (Neuron, ).

In a second set of mice, the researchers also managed to 鈥渄elete鈥� the memory linking pain to the chamber without deleting the memory linking pain to the sound by boosting alpha-CaMKII at the same time as exposing them to the chamber but not the noise.

Tsien cautions against deleting unpleasant memories in people. 鈥淎ll memories, even very painful emotional memories, have their purposes. We learn from those experiences to avoid making the same kind of mistake.鈥�