Electroshock therapy proves remarkably effective at erasing disturbing memories

While modern-day memory erasing technology is nowhere near the level of commercialization depicted in the movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , researchers are closer than they’ve ever been to developing it as a legitimate form of therapy.

Breakthroughs in the technology were announced following a round of experiments performed by Marijn Kroes and his colleagues from Radboud University Nijmegen, and conducted on 39 patients undergoing electroconvulsive therapy (ECT, also known as “electroshock therapy”) for severe depression.

For those unfamiliar with the technique, ECT passes electrical currents to parts of the brain, with the goal being to disrupt some of the organ’s processes (it should be noted that, since the technology tends to induce a brief seizure, patients are given an anesthetic and muscle relaxants during their treatment sessions).

In terms of Kroes’s experiment, the group of neuroscientists wanted to target and disrupt the reconsolidation process, which refers to the brain’s act of retrieving a memory from its memory bank, if you will, and re-writing it on to the brain’s circuits whenever it’s accessed. This happens every time a memory is recalled, and Kroes believes that by targeting this specific process, delivery of the electricity could be fine-tuned to the point that it might eventually be used to treat mental trauma, psychiatric disorders, and drug addiction.

To confirm his theory, each of the aforementioned 39 patients was asked to watch two upsetting videos: one about a child hit by a car and has to have his feet severed by surgeons, and the other about a pair of sisters, one of whom was kidnapped and sexually assaulted.

A week after watching the videos, the patients were asked to recall details about one of the two stories (not both). Afterwards, they were randomly sorted in three groups: A, B, and C (the control group).

Those in groups A and B were treated with ECT right after they finished their retelling of the story. The next day, Group A patients had to complete a multi-choice quiz about both stories. While they could not recall details from the memories erased by the ECT, interestingly enough, the group as a whole did a better job at recalling parts of the story for which their memories had not been initially reactivated (and therefore not treated with the ECT).

Group B, meanwhile, had their memories tested 90 minutes after the ECT session; following a round of tests, it was confirmed the group’s recall abilities were still intact.

This suggests that it takes time to curb or impair a memory.

Group C did not receive ECT at all, and their recall abilities were fully in place.

This led Kroes and his colleagues to conclude that, in order to erase a disturbing memory, reconsolidation and ECT are required in order to fully erase the specific memory from an individual’s mind.

Read the entire study at Nature.com