A landmark experiment in France has opened the door to the possibility techniques could be developed that erase a person's painful memories.
In what has been described as pioneering new research, neuroscientists from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and ESPCI ParisTech manipulated memories in sleeping mice to turn neutral memories into positive ones.
More important, the results reveal a stunning new insight on how our brains work. It seems our memories are stored in a piecemeal fashion in our brains and not in one central location.
The research shows that one area of the brain stores the factual information of the memories. On the other hand, the emotions associated with these memories are stored in a different area of the brain.
The implications of this discovery are profound. It might mean scientists might one day be able to go into a person's brain while they're sleeping and deactivate the emotional element of a negative memory, said The Huffington Post.
What this basically does is to remove the pain from a painful memory.
"For humans, you would need a way to detect during sleep the periods during which the traumatic experiences are reactivated," said Dr. Karim Benchenane, a neuroscientist at CNRS and one of the study's authors.
"It is likely that it will be soon possible to do so with fMRI."
A practical application of this breakthrough is a long way off because of the risks associated with attaching electrodes to a human brain, which is what the French scientists did in the experiment with the mice.
But the potential for future treatment is promising, said scientists.
"We're just scratching the tip of the technical iceberg and definitely have our work cut out for us," said Steve Ramirez, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has conducted research on memory manipulation.
"Nonetheless, the study gives us a fantastic and novel framework under which to work to achieve these kinds of treatment-related goals."
The findings were published on March 9 in the journal, Nature Neuroscience.