The new approach combines two methods previously shown to weaken memories of fear, says first author Marie Monfils, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas, Austin.
Then, the study authors tried to weaken memories associated with a painful stimulus.
However, the experiment builds on years of research that shows that ketamine has a unique potential to weaken memories safely.
In other words, scientists had long thought that they knew how memories were formed and weakened, and now they had clear, cell-level proof of it, as well as a way of strengthening and weakening memories directly.
Events such as electroconvulsive shock or anaesthetization can weaken a memory; events such as injections of epinephrine or amphetamine can strengthen a memory.
(Socrates, for one, felt that writing per se was going to not only hurt oral arguments, but weaken human memory).
In this perspective, sleep deprivation may weaken the memory trace which would decay more quickly in the TSD group.
Blockade of alpha -2 receptors with yohimbine infusion was shown to weaken working memory [ 76], and in addition to induce motor hyperactivity [ 77].
But unfortunately, previous studies commonly used a scrambled version of ZIP (Scr-ZIP) as a control peptide, which was demonstrated to be equally effective at reversing LTP as ZIP, or at least, weaken the memory to a certain degree [ 37].
If this drug could weaken fear memories, then why not other memories?
