Everyone has a memory or two they’d rather forget. For me, it’s the harrowing period I spent in hospital with my three-week-old daughter as she underwent multiple life-saving operations. She’s now a healthy six-year-old, but even the briefest recollection of that time still has the ability to reduce me to a sobbing wreck in the shower or the supermarket aisle. Such is the power of memory. But what if we had the ability to change or even erase painful memories? Would we do it? Should we do it?
Up until now, questions like these have only cropped up in sci-fi novels and films. But new scientific research has revealed there could actually be a way to manipulate or remove memories in the not-too-distant future. Steve Ramirez, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University, is leading this research. At the end of last year, he released a book on the topic, How to Change a Memory, in which he reveals how memory can be turned on and off like a switch, edited and even constructed from nothing.
