remembering - microwave devices like those in " Men in Black " and " Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind " could soon be a thing of the past ( if they were ever a thing at all ) , as researchers have now get wind a much cheap and less complicated way of life to erase unwanted memories . harmonize to a new study that appears in the journalPsychonomic Bulletin and Review , the key to forgetting could lie in simply change the way we think about the “ context ” surrounding our memory .
Context is quite a broad thing that can be heavy to immobilise down . Essentially , it advert to everything else that ’s going on around a peculiar upshot , and , according to the study author , has a huge influence over how memories are “ organized and retrieve ” by the nous . For example , if you happen to have a high-risk experience after drinking too much tequila ( itself a jolly in effect retentivity eraser ) , then it ’s likely that the very thought of taking another shot of the stuff will jab up unpleasant memories of that experience .
While you ’ll probably only have yourself to find fault for getting too inebriated and putting yourself in a particular disembodied spirit , multitude who experience more serious sorry events can sometimes developpost - traumatic stress disorder(PTSD ) , whereby sealed contextual cues cause them to live over painful memories . If diseased person can con to dissociate these memories from their context , however , it may be possible to ease their PTSD .
To test whether this is potential , researchers from Princeton University and Dartmouth College subject volunteers to a memory test , in which they were show a list of words that they were told either to memorize or forget . In between viewing each word , they were shown an image of a natural landscape painting , such as a mountain or a woods , in the hope that they would mechanically associate the memory of the word with this contextual cue .
People who experience distressing consequence often have from post - traumatic accent disorder . John Gomez / Shutterstock
While this was going on , the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging ( fMRI ) to celebrate participants ’ encephalon activity , observe the neural patterns that occurred as they encode these contextual images .
Subjects were then asked to try and think the word lists , while researchers once again measured their brain activity using fMRI . event showed that those who had been told to think of the lists tended to replay the same neural patterns associated with context when recalling the Bible , point that the remembering and its context had become intertwined in their brains .
However , those who did not remember the lists did not repeat this neural figure when unsuccessfully attempt to recall the Son , suggesting that the effect and its context had not become entangled in their mind . significantly , the arcdegree to which this contextual recall was diminish correlate straight off to participants ’ power to commemorate the words from the list .
jumper cable investigator Jeremy Manning excuse in astatementthat this process is similar to “ press thoughts of your nanna ’s cooking out of your head if you do n’t require to believe about your grandmother at that moment . ” Having now identified this as a mechanism for forgetting , he hope to see his work used as a political program to develop a kitchen stove of new retentivity therapy .
“ For example , we might need to forget a traumatic upshot , such as soldiers with PTSD . Or we might require to get old information ' out of our forefront , ' so we can focus on learning new material , ” he said .
