How It’s Possible to Enhance or Suppress Memories

What if scientists could manipulate your brain so that a traumatic memory lost its emotional power over your psyche? Steve Ramirez (CAS’10), a Boston University neuroscientist fascinated by memory, believes that a small structure in the brain could hold the keys to future therapeutic techniques for treating depression, anxiety, and PTSD, someday allowing clinicians to enhance positive memories or suppress negative ones. This is what a bad memory looks like in a mouse brain. The cells glowing green indicate that they are being activated in storing a fear memory. Courtesy of the Ramirez Group at Boston University Inside our brains, a cashew-shaped structure called the hippocampus stores the sensory and emotional information that makes up memories, whether they be positive or negative ones. No two memories are exactly alike, and likewise, each memory we have is stored inside a unique combination of brain cells that contain all the environmental and emotional information associated with that memory. The hippocampus itself, although small, comprises many different subregions all working in tandem to recall the elements of a specific memory. Now, in a new paper in Current Biology , Steve Ramirez, a BU College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences, and a team of collaborators have shown just how pliable memory is if you know which regions of the hippocampus to stimulate—which could someday enable personalized treatment for people haunted by particularly troubling memories. Credit: Boston University “Many psychiatric disorders, especially PTSD, are based on the idea that after there’s a really traumatic experience, the person isn’t able to move on because they recall their fear over and over again,” says Briana Chen, first author of the paper and a Columbia University graduate researcher studying depression. In their study, Chen and Ramirez, the paper’s senior author, show […]

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