LiveScience reports:
Scientists have for the first time erased long-term memories in rats and also directly seen how the brain is changed by learning.
The research points to potential human benefits.
These findings could prove key "to understanding how memories can be augmented, for example in diseases that affect memory, like Alzheimer's," said neuroscientist Mark Bear at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT.
The research could also help treat pain that does not go away, "like neuropathic pain, where people have a moderately severe injury, typically to the hands or feet, and instead of going away in a couple of hours just perpetuates," neurologist and molecular biologist Todd Sacktor at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn said in a phone interview.
Sacktor and his collaborators worked on rats trained to avoid a shock zone on a rotating platform. If they received an injection of a chemical dubbed ZIP into the hippocampus one day to one month after they learned to keep away from the shock zone, they no longer shunned it.