A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about propranolol, a drug that can erase the emotion of fearful memories. When volunteers take the drug before recalling a scary memory about a spider, it dulled the emotional sting of future recollections. It's not, however, a mind-wiping pill in the traditional science-fiction sense, and it can't erase memories as was so widely reported by the hysterical mainstream media.
The research that's published today is a different story. Jin-Hee Han from the University of Toronto has indeed found a way to erase a specific fearful memory, but despite the superficial similarities, this is a very different story to the propranolol saga. For a start, Han worked in mice not humans. And unlike the propranolol researchers, who were interested in developing ways of treating people with post-traumatic stress disorder, Han's goal was to understand how memories are stored in the brain. Erasing them was ...
