A new study suggests that memories that trigger anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) could be erased without affecting other important memories of past events.
The finding could help develop drugs that can treat anxiety without affecting the patient’s normal memory, researchers said.
Brains create long-term memories by increasing the strength of connections between neurons and maintaining those connections over time.
The study, published in the journal Current Biology, tested that hypothesis by stimulating two sensory neurons connected to a single motor neuron of the marine snail Aplysia. One sensory neuron was stimulated to induce an associative memory and the other to induce a non-associative memory.
