Fear Erased in Rat Brains Fearful memories have a powerful grip
on the brain, but researchers have developed a new technique in
rats that loosens that grip and overwrites the fear response
permanently. The technique, involving exposing rats to the very
thing they were primed to fear and taking advantage of a moment
of weakness in memory of that fear, could eventually be used to
develop clinical treatments of fears in humans, the scientists
said. Fear memories, like other bad memories, are particularly
sticky in the brain compared to "good" ones. Evolution played a
hand in this, the thinking goes, because fearing things that can
harm us is an advantage to survival. So the brain has a hard
time letting go of these memories, as well as distinguishing
rational from irrational fears. Researchers have long looked for
a way to short-circuit the brain and help it delete those
irrational fears. Formation of a fear A fearful memory is of
course triggered by some stimulus or event that scares us, say a
dog bite that cau