It goes without saying that life is not plain sailing for everyone, even if you are the richest person on earth. Money can buy nearly everything if you have enough of it, but happiness and joy, that is a different story altogether. Bad memories do serve a purpose, it helps us remain grounded, but what happens when you have the opportunity to erase those bad memories? Apparently, scientists over at the Scripps Research Institute have somewhat performed something similar in mice with a degree of success. As part of the experiment, researchers started to get a bunch of laboratory mice addicted to meth and were trained to associate their addiction with select sensory rewards.
In an effort to block those memories and help the mice forget about their meth addiction, scientists blocked the action of the protein known as actin, which if let through, will create a chain of molecules during memory formation. This resulted in the mice forgetting to associate certain things with addiction memories, and in early experiments, the mice were no longer stimulated by things that reminded of meth, with the assumption that their other memories remained unaffected. How effective would this be in humans remains to be seen as I am quite sure that plenty of work still needs to be done, and if only there was a real world Professor X to help us out.
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