In the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a doctor uses a technology to track and erase targeted memories in peoples’ brains. His patients mainly want to forget about painful relationships, which requires purging every memory remnant linked to the relationship. Once the purge is complete, the collective memory—and all of the pain it held—is gone.
Though memory zapping isn’t feasible for several reasons, the premise of tracking down memories is quite close to a technology that neuroscientists are using right now to understand how memory works. Like the fictitious doctor, researchers must first find a “neural signature” (a unique brain-pattern fingerprint) associated with a given memory. Once identified, the signature is traceable. But instead of zapping the memory, as the doctor and his underlings do in the movie, researchers can observe it to find out what happens when competing memories form in the same cerebral space.
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