Scientists use electric shocks to successfully remove designated memory in human brain

[Abstract] This breakthrough is expected to help depression patients and traumatized people in the future to forget the painful past. According to British media reports, Dutch scientists recently announced that they have successfully used electric shock therapy to remove the designated memory in the human brain. This breakthrough is expected to help depression sufferers and traumatized people in the future to forget the painful past. Electric shock therapy is also called shock therapy, refers to the doctor with the electric shock machine and other special instruments and facilities, in a short period of time, with a weak, moderate current stimulation of the patient's brain, resulting in the internal brain of patients with integrated action, and to achieve local therapeutic purpose of a special treatment. Traditionally, electroshock therapy is mainly used to treat diseases such as psychosis. As a result of the treatment process, patients will inevitably have systemic convulsions, temporary loss of consciousness and even long-term amnesia and other symptoms, this treatment in the medical field controversy, was criticized as "cruel treatment." However, this "brutal" treatment has now made a new breakthrough, the scope of application is expected to be further widened. Brain science tells us that once a person's brain has a certain memory, the memory itself will be stored there permanently, not easily forgotten. Often, in order to alleviate the fear and anxiety caused by bad memories, doctors teach patients to forget to look forward and overcome old memories by building new memories, but old memories are always firmly rooted in the brain and are activated at any time. The results of a series of experiments by scientists suggest that human memory can be removed from the brain's "storeroom" and eventually reappear through the cranial nerve circuitry. In the brain extracts memory, can carry out human "interference", as long as the correct timing of electric shock, the brain to carry out a slight shock stimulation, you can effectively destroy the specified memory, and successfully block the "memory consolidation process." About 10 years ago, scientists injected a rodent's brain with drugs that interfered with the process of memory consolidation, and the animal's designated memory was successfully removed without destroying other memories. According to the results of this experiment, if the drug is applied to the human brain, theoretically, the memory of fear stored in the brain will be blocked, deleted or rewritten, while other memories can be intact. However, because of the high risk of injecting drugs into the brain, there has been little progress in related experiments. The Dutch scientists ' successful experiment proved that human brain memory can be artificially interfered. Cross, a Dutch neurologist who is in charge of the experiment, says we experimented with more than 40 volunteers. These volunteers, after conducting electroshock therapy experiments, have forgotten the painful past of the heart, but the good memories have not been affected. Why can memory be deleted? The scientists gave different explanations. Some scientists believe that electroshock therapy alters the pattern of blood flow or the metabolism of the brain, while others believe that electroshock therapy releases some of the chemicals that fight depression in the human brain. Although the deletion of memory experiment has been successful, there are still many blind spots in the cognition of this problem. For example, is electroshock therapy effective for all or only for individual groups? Erasing memories by electroshock therapy isTemporary or permanent? Is there any side effect of human intervention in brain memory? Although this series of problems remains to be studied by scientists to solve the mystery, but the "pain" from the life experience removed, it seems that is no longer a distant dream.