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" Not that I necessarily think it&amp;#x27;s a good idea to Eternal Sunshine your past relationships that didn&amp;#x27;t work out, but I&amp;#x27;m fascinated by this emerging research in memory erasure. Scientists at Northwestern University found that they could lessen people&amp;#x27;s fear by exposing them to a smell associated with the fear while they were sleeping. (It sounds even weirder if you know they first induced fear by giving people mild shocks while they looked at two different faces, each with a specific odor. I have no idea who would think of such a thing!) It&amp;#x27;s evidently the first time human&amp;#x27;s emotional memories have been successfully changed during sleep, though it was a very small study. There have been more similar attempts too. An experiment at Stanford chemically deleted scary memories of sleeping rats, and at MIT, scientists located a gene that may be critical for extinction of memories. They say this could be helpful in helping PTSD patients forget bad memories more easily, which could be huge in their recovery. However, no word on whether it will ever be used on PTRD (posttraumatic relationship disorder) sufferers. To be fair, that&amp;#x27;s probably not the top of the priority list, so you&amp;#x27;ll have to keep crying over the slow-motion memory reel in your head for now. Did you ever have a relationship so bad you&amp;#x27;d want to wipe away the bad memories? Photo: Everett Collection"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/sex-love-life/blogs/smitten/2013/09/science-might-be-getting-close>