What if you could erase any knowledge of unpleasant experiences? It would be easier than forgetting, wouldn’t it? This is not just a Hollywood fantasy as in the plotline of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” In reality, scientists have been working for years on figuring out how memories are stored, and how we can might be able to erase them. Todd Sacktor is a neurologist and neuroscientist, who has been working on this question. He runs a memory lab with the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center.
Sacktor explains that the way our brain creates and stores memories is somewhat similar to that of a computer. “There’s something fundamentally analogous to the hard drive,” Sacktor says.
“We have these different types of memories. We have memories for fear, we have memories for pleasurable events in the past, we have memories for the language that we speak, the words,” Sacktor explains. “And yet, as in a hard disc on a computer, it’s all being stored by these ones and zeros…we’re just beginning to understand the fundamental way that information is being stored in the brain.”
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