Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

Applying Psychology
in the 21st Century
In Pursuit of a Memory Eraser
Most of us would welcome a way to im-
prove our memories. Wouldn’t it be help-
ful to retain more information in textbooks, 
or to remember the names of people we 
meet at a party, or just to recall where we 
left our car keys?
But would it also be important to devise 
a method to be able to forget information in 
memory?
Some researchers believe so, and they are 
trying to identify ways to allow people to for-
get traumatic events, persistent fears, or even 
annoying habits. Researchers recently took 
an important step in the direction of being 
able to erase unwanted memories by discov-
ering an intriguing substance that seems to 
be a key player in the formation of memories. 
The substance, called PKM-zeta, seems to be 
present whenever a connection between 
neurons is strengthened. So researchers put 
PKM-zeta to a test in lab rats. The rats were 
trained to associate a certain tone with re-
ceiving a mild electric shock, such that they 
became fearful of the tone—a learning expe-
rience that was stored in their memories. 
However, when the rats’ brains were injected 
later with a drug that stops production of 
PKM-zeta, a strange thing happened: The 
tone no longer produced a fear response. The 
rats forgot what they had originally learned 
(Pastalkova et al., 2006; Yao et al., 2008).
The study supports the hypothesis that 
memory, far from being a rigid and durable 
phenomenon, is actually fl uid and malleable. 
The inhibition of PKM-zeta did not induce 
the rats to forget what they learned as much 
as it stopped the memory from being re- 
encoded in the brain after it was activated.
New treatments erase intrusive traumatic 
memories. 
A treatment that can stop the encoding of 
memories has the potential to help people 
who are suffering from intrusive traumatic 
memories. For example, the blood-pressure 
drug propranolol affects areas of the brain 
that are responsible for memory storage. In 
one study, researchers gave a small group of 
hospital patients who had just suffered an 
accident or a rape a course of treatment with 
either propranolol or a placebo. Three 
months later, when the patients were ex-
posed to reminders of their traumatic expe-
riences, those who had received the 
propranolol had a less stressful reaction than 
those who had received the placebo (Jha, 
2006; Brunet et al., 2007; Brunet et al., 2008).
Ultimately, the goal of researchers is to 
use substances such as PKM-zeta and pro-
pranolol to interfere with the reconsolida-
tion of traumatic memories that have been 
reawakened. The idea is not to block the 
memory entirely but to reduce its inten-
sity upon reconsolidation so that the vic-
tim will remember what happened but 
not be tortured by the memory. If that 
happens, victims may be treated more 
successfully (Pitman & Delahanty, 2005; 
Carey, 2009a).
• Why might researchers want only to reduce the intensity of a traumatic memory 
rather than erase it altogether?
• What might be some of the practical or ethical issues involved with erasing un-
wanted memories?
RETHINK
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