Neuroscientists Induce Selective Amnesia in Rats
March 13th, 2007Via: Nature:
A single, specific memory has been wiped from the brains of rats, leaving other recollections intact.
…
The brain secures memories by transferring them from short-term to long-term storage, through a process called reconsolidation. It has been shown before that this process can be interrupted with drugs. But Joseph LeDoux of the Center for Neural Science at New York University and his colleagues wanted to know how specific this interference was: could the transfer of one specific memory be meddled with without affecting others?
“Our concern was: would you do something really massive to their memory network?” says LeDoux.
Scary music
To find out, they trained rats to fear two different musical tones, by playing them at the same time as giving the rats an electric shock. Then, they gave half the rats a drug known to cause limited amnesia (U0126, which is not approved for use in people), and reminded all the animals, half of which were still under the influence of the drug, of one of their fearful memories by replaying just one of the tones.
When they tested the rats with both tones a day later, untreated animals were still fearful of both sounds, as if they expected a shock. But those treated with the drug were no longer afraid of the tone they had been reminded of under treatment. The process of re-arousing the rats’ memory of being shocked with the one tone while they were drugged had wiped out that memory completely, while leaving their memory of the second tone intact.
LeDoux’s team also confirms the idea that a part of the brain called the amygdala is central to this process – communication between neurons in this part of the brain usually increases when a fearful memory forms, but it decreases in the treated rats. This shows that the fearful memory is actually deleted, rather than simply breaking the link between the memory and a fearful response.
It’s just a matter of time before they figure out how to do this without drugs via the television. So you give some people some scary news about the economy but then couple it with a blast of e-soma (or whatever) and their then immune to that sort of info.
Of course, assumming that such a technique isn’t already in use is a big assumption.
Like many applications that the military came up with on black budget financing years ago, and has applied against the general good,yet another finally reaches the civilian sector for non-military applications . . .
tmb,
Now that’s exactly what I thought. I was salivating over finding DARPA funding for this Dr. Mengele Ledoux character, but I didn’t see any. Maybe I missed it? It looks like his money comes from NIH, which, as we know, means nothing. That academic grant system is as filthy as any racket out there.
Look at Ledoux, though. His whole show is about the neurobiology of fear.
..I’m sorry, what were you saying? I must have dozed off for a second.
Wait- what is this place? How did I get here? More importantly, how did this dead body get here? And who’s gun is this?