Could Tweaking Our Memories Help Us Feel Better? | Nat Geo Live

The work that I've been doing at MIT focuses on finding individual memories in the brain and then trying to actually tinker with those memories. Can we turn them on? Can we turn them off? Can we change the contents of those memories? Ethical stuff aside, you can imagine the implications for things like actually being able to activate memories in Alzheimer's, for example, or using memories to combat certain symptoms associated with psychiatric disorders.

The main question that we started off tackling was, can we go in? Can we find the brain cells that are active during a particular memory? And again, can we actually modulate those brain cells? So, what we would do is, uh, we would go in, we would find these brain cells that we think are holding on to a particular memory, and we would actually artificially install a light-sensitive switch in those brain cells.

So, that means that we can actually take an optic fiber, do some careful brain surgery, and actually shoot lasers into the brain and reactivate these brain cells or inactivate these brain cells that we think are housing a particular memory. You don't have to imagine any more the possibility of bringing back a memory that was once thought to be lost in a patient with Alzheimer's.

Or imagine going in and turning the dial down on the emotional gut-wrenching "I hate my life" feeling of... not a breakup, but something more seriously, something like PTSD. Imagine being able to turn the dial down on those negative emotions or being able to jump start particular moods when your mood is really low or even under depression, uh, in a depressed state.

So, those are the things that we don't have to imagine any more. Those are the things that we are on the cusp of actually being able to do with, I think, powerful therapeutic value.