What If We Could Edit Our Memories?

pcmag.com:

In Apple TV+’s new series Severance, Adam Scott plays Mark, an employee of Lumon Industries that has a unique approach to work-life balance. When you’re at work, the company blocks all memories of your home life and vice versa. That way you’re never distracted by any intrusive thoughts and can devote your full energy to each phase of your life. Of course, things go wildly wrong, with employees’ personalities splintering into “Innies” and “Outies” with very different priorities.

It’s a cool and creepy premise, but it got us thinking: How close is modern science to being able to selectively edit our memories? We delve deep into the latest research to see whether it’s possible.

The actual process of how memories are formed and stored in the brain is a topic of much discussion. The general consensus is that the frontal cortex and the hippocampus encode your sensory input into “experience,” which is then encoded into specific groups of neurons in the brain. These memories take multiple forms—sensory memories, the ability to recall impressions from your sense organs; short-term memories, which are used for brief spans of time and typically have low emotional content; and long-term memories, which can be further split into implicit and explicit memories. It’s the latter that scientists are working on.

Not being able to physically pinpoint the location of a memory makes it difficult to intervene in their operations. But what’s fascinating is how our brains operate in an almost quantum-mechanical manner when we bring those memories back to the surface. The technical term is “reconsolidation,” where the act of recovering and revisiting a past experience alters the memory itself. This is a pretty big shift in how we understand the