Is it possible to erase certain memories

Forcing your brain to repeatedly reconstruct your painful memory will allow you to rewrite your memory in a way that reduces the emotional trauma. Basically, this means that you practice intentionally shutting down your painful memory as soon as it starts. After doing this for several weeks or months, you can theoretically train your brain not to remember.

You basically weaken the neural connection that allows you to call up that particular memory. Exposure therapy is a type of behavioral therapy widely used in the treatment of PTSD, which can be particularly helpful for flashbacks and nightmares. While working with a therapist, you safely confront both traumatic memories and common triggers so that you can learn to cope with them.

Exposure therapy, sometimes called prolonged exposure, involves frequently retelling or thinking about the story of your trauma. In some cases, therapists bring patients to places that they have been avoiding because of PTSD.

A multisite clinical trial of exposure therapy among female service members found that exposure therapy was more successful than another common therapy at reducing PTSD symptoms. Propranolol, which is also used to treat performance anxiety, stops the physical fear response: shaky hands, sweating, racing heart, and dry mouth. Recent double-blind trials in 60 people with PTSD found that a dose of propranolol given 90 minutes before the start of a memory recall session telling your story , once a week for six weeks, provided a significant reduction in PTSD symptoms.

This process takes advantage of the memory reconsolidation process that happens when you recall a memory. Having propranolol in your system while you recall a memory suppresses the emotional fear response. Later, people are still able to remember the details of the event, but it no longer feels devastating and unmanageable. Psychiatrists will often prescribe this medication off-label.

You can inquire about local psychiatrists in your area and see if they use this treatment protocol in their practices. Memory is the process in which your mind records, stores, and recalls information. It is an extremely complex process that is still not well understood. Many theories about how different aspects of memory work are still unproven and debated. Researchers do know that there are several different types of memory, all of which depend on a complex network of neurons you have about billion located in many different parts of your brain.

The first step in memory creation is the recording of information into the short-term memory. Researchers have known for several decades that this process of encoding new memories relies heavily on a small area of the brain called the hippocampus. Sometimes though, your brain flags particular pieces of information as important and worthy of being transferred into long-term storage through a process called memory consolidation.

It is widely recognized that emotion plays a major role in this process. For decades, researchers believed that consolidation was a one-time thing. Once you stored a memory, it would always be there. Recent research , however, has proven that this is not the case. Think of a particular memory like a sentence on a computer screen. Every time you recall a memory you have to rewrite that sentence, firing specific neurons in a specific order, as if typing out the words.

This activity involved learning associations between pairs of words, and then trying to forget the memories by either recalling alternative ones to substitute them or blocking them out.

Results showed that both strategies are equally effective, but that different neural circuits are activated. In post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD , people who have experienced a traumatic life event are troubled by unwanted memories that insist on intruding into the consciousness.

Knowing more about how a memory can be substituted or suppressed might help people with this debilitating condition. The mental context in which a person perceives an event affects how the mind organizes the memories of that event.

We remember events in relation to other events, where it occurred, and so on. This, in turn, affects what triggers those later memories, or how we can choose to recall them.

Context can be anything that is associated with a memory. It could include sense-related cues, such as smell or taste, the external environment, events, thoughts or feelings around the time of the event, incidental features of the item, for example, where it appears on a page, and so on.

As we use contextual clues to recall information about past events, scientists have suggested that any process that changes our perception of that context can increase or reduce our ability to retrieve specific memories.

To test this, a team of researchers set participants a task of memorizing sets of words, while viewing images of nature, such as beaches or forests. The aim of the images was to create the contextual memories.

Some participants were then told to forget the words on the first list before studying the second. When the time came to recall the words, the group that had been asked to forget were able to recall fewer words.

In deliberately trying to forget the words, they had discarded the context in which they had memorized them. In addition, the greater the detachment from the context, the fewer words they remembered.

This suggests that we can intentionally forget. The findings could be useful for helping people either to remember things, for example, when studying, or to reduce unwanted memories, for example, in treating PTSD. Treatment for people with phobias includes exposure to the item that causes fear. While this works temporarily, the fear often returns in time. In August , researchers from Uppsala University and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden showed that disrupting a memory can reduce its strength.

In their experiment, people who were afraid of spiders were exposed to pictures of their eight-legged friends in three sessions. The aim was to disrupt the memory by disturbing it and then resetting it. Then, 10 minutes later, the participants viewed the images for longer. The next day, they saw the pictures again. By the third viewing, the researchers noticed that there was less activity in the part of the brain known as the amygdala. This reflected a lower level of emotional interference and a lesser tendency in the participants to avoid spiders.

The scientists concluded that the first exposure made the memory unstable. When the longer exposure occurred, the memory was re-saved in a weaker form. This, they say, stops the fear from returning so easily. The researchers believe that this could strengthen techniques for dealing with anxiety and phobias in cases where exposure alone does not provide a long-term solution.

To complement cognitive approaches, some scientists have suggested using drugs to remove bad memories or the fear-inducing aspect that is associated with them.

In one study , people with a fear of heights took D-cycloserine before a virtual reality exposure therapy. One week, and again 3 months later, their stress levels were lower than before. In other research , when a group of people with PTSD took propranolol at the time of consolidating a memory, for example, just after recounting a bad experience, they had fewer stress symptoms the next time the memory was activated.

Researchers in New York carried out tests on rats that showed it is possible to erase single memories from the brain, by delivering a drug known as U, while leaving the rest of the brain intact. In a mouse study published in Nature in , scientists used a drug known as an HDACi to erase epigenetic markers in the DNA that enable bad memories to live on. This could help people, for example, with PTSD.

You should always contact your doctor or other qualified healthcare professional before starting, changing, or stopping any kind of health treatment. Read More To purposefully forget things, start by making a list of the memories you want to forget and what bothers you about them. Next, identify objects or images that trigger your bad memories, such as photos of your ex or a particular scent, and remove these things from your environment.

You can also try a mental exercise like a ritual release to help you let go of your memories, or you can seek professional help from a therapist to guide and support you through the process. For tips on replacing your bad memories with good ones, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No. Log in Social login does not work in incognito and private browsers. Please log in with your username or email to continue. No account yet?

Create an account. Edit this Article. We use cookies to make wikiHow great. By using our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Cookie Settings. Learn why people trust wikiHow. Download Article Explore this Article methods. Tips and Warnings. Related Articles. Article Summary. Method 1. Figure out what you would like to forget. Before you can forget a memory, you will need think about the details of that memory. Doing so might be hard, but it is necessary. Write out your answers to the following questions to figure out the details of the memory: What happened?

Who was involved? Where and when did it happen? What else was going on? How did you feel? Think about what bothers you the most about the memory. Your next step is to pinpoint the most upsetting parts of the memory.

Getting to the root of what bothers you the most will help you figure out what you need to forget. Write these specific things down so that you can work on forgetting them. Keep in mind that you can't forget the existence of your ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend, but you can forget particular dates, events, or sense memories.

For example, you might be able to forget the smell of a perfume, your first date, or something that your ex said to you. If you find yourself dwelling on traumatic experiences, list the people who harassed you, the specific locations that caused you grief, and other sensory details like the smell of the lunchroom, the locker room, or the gym.

Erase the memory with a ritual release. You can use the details that you have identified to perform a ritual release. A ritual release is a mental exercise that may help you to forget a memory. In your mind, picture a part of the memory that you want to forget. Try to imagine this detail like a picture. Then, imagine that you are setting that picture on fire. Imagine the fire burning your mental memory picture until the picture is gone. You could also try using another image in place of the actual memory.

For example, you could imagine your bully as a Honda Civic sinking into a pond or as a freight train slowly crashing into a wall. This may not work for some people, as old memories never truly leave the brain. Remove your "trigger objects. For example, you may want to get rid of anything that reminds you of your ex, including photographs and gifts your ex gave you. Do a scan of all of your senses when you're trying to figure out what's triggering a memory.

Anything can trigger memory—it might be the light at a certain time a day, a phrase someone else used to say, or a certain smell, for instance.