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You can erase the feeling of fear from your memory
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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Under the influence of fear, a person is capable of committing the most insane acts, because this feeling deprives people of the ability to control their own minds and adequately respond to the situation. Very often, phobias, fears and anxiety have no basis and are absolutely groundless, but it is very difficult to get rid of them, sometimes the fight against them drags on for a lifetime.
Newly formed emotional memories can be erased from the human brain, Swedish scientists have claimed.
In a large-scale study, the results of which were published in the journal Science, experts have proven that when people learn about something, memory consolidation occurs, due to which memories are transferred to long-term memory. The formation of proteins is behind this process.
When people try to remember something, the memory becomes unstable for a short period, but then the process of consolidation follows again. It is not that we do not remember exactly what happened. We simply remember not the event itself as a fact, but our last thoughts about this event.
But if you influence the consolidation process that follows memorization, you can influence the content of memory.
Memorizing new information is accompanied by modification of special proteins in the nuclei of nerve cells that participate in DNA packaging. If this process is blocked, the ability to memorize new events is lost.
Volunteers who participated in the experiment were shown images of neutral content, accompanied by the effect of electric current. The brain remembers the feeling of fear. When these images were shown again without the effect of current, people still felt fear.
If the process of memory consolidation was disrupted, then subsequent demonstrations of images did not evoke any emotions.
Scientists tracked these processes using magnetic resonance imaging. It turned out that when the consolidation process was blocked, the part of the brain's memory that remembered the fear was erased.
"Our research could be a real breakthrough in the study of memory processes and the feeling of fear," comments study co-author Thomas Ågren. "This discovery could be of great importance for people prone to phobias and anxieties."
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