When we think back on our lives, we generally try to dwell on good times and come to terms with bad. But for those who suffer from anxiety disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder and phobias, just one intractable and unwelcome memory can influence a lifetime of perceptions, emotions and behavior, despite therapists' best efforts.
Well, Scientists have finally found an amazing and an awestrucking solution to our problem!
Scientists are now able to hack into your memories, edit, remove and even implant new ones, apparently.
So whether you want to forget making a show of yourself when pissed, remove a phobia, or move on from a particularly painful relationship, the answer may well be within reach.
If it all sounds a little science fiction, that's because it is - films such as Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind and Total Recall have long toyed with the idea of altering our memories. But thanks to the advances in neurological scanning technology over the past few decades, we're now closer than you might realise to making these technologies (or something similar) a reality.
So how do you go about deleting a memory? To understand that, you need to understand how memories form and are kept alive in our brains in the first place.
In the past, scientists used to think that memories were stored in one specific spot, like a neurological file cabinet, but they've since realised that every single memory we have is locked up in connections across the brain.
Numerous studies have now shown that by blocking a chemical called norepinephrine - which is involved in the fight or flight response and is responsible for triggering symptoms such as sweaty palms and a racing heart - researchers can 'dampen' traumatic memories, and stop them being associated with negative emotions.
For example, at the end of last year, researchers from the Netherlands demonstrated they could take away arachnophobes' fear of spiders by using a drug called propranolol to block norepinephrine.
Perhaps even more worrying is the research into how easy it is for scientists to implant false memories into people. By manipulating the same reconsolidation process, psychologist Julia Shaw has shown that it's possible to make people remember a crime they never committed - and even provide vivid details about the fictional event.
So far, researchers haven't tried to explicitly delete a memory in its entirety from humans (that we know of, at least), due to the ethical implications, but the evidence suggests that it's something that would be possible, given the right combination of drugs and recall exercises.
