New Memory Erasure Drug for Treating PTSD USA- New York, NY |
Oct 21 2012 | (22:58:45 - EDT) Memory-erasure technology is
finally starting to follow Eternal Sunshine canon. In the latest
breakthrough, Stanford University researchers announced at the
Society for Neuroscience meeting that they are manipulating
fearful rat memories. Like the University of Puerto Rico study
involving injections that cause rats to forget fears, this
research is chemical-based, but the magic happens while the rats
sleep. The team at Stanford hopes that sleep-based therapies
will expand options for treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
First, researchers conditioned mice to fear the scent of jasmine
by administering a shock every time the mice sniffed the scent.
The mice showed the characteristic sign of fear the next day
when the scent was present--they froze up anticipating the
shock. One group of mice got the conventional treatment of
extinction therapy-- repeated exposure to to the scent without
the shock. The fear dissipated