Thanks to science, you can soon wipe out your worst memories

nypost.com ^ | February 10, 2016 | 3:29am | By Reed Tucker

[Red Badger]

Imagine being able to erase your most traumatic memories. For a soldier, that would mean no longer being haunted by images from the battlefield. For a movie critic, no longer recalling having seen “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2.”

It’s just one of the fascinating peeks into the mystery of the human mind chronicled on “Memory Hackers,” airing Wednesday at 9 p.m. on PBS’ “Nova.”

“Memory is an inherently interesting thing,” the show’s writer, director and producer, Michael Bicks, tells The Post. “You think you know what it is, but when you think about it, you realize that you don’t.”

Many of us assume that memory is like a faithful recording of our lives stored in our brains, persistent and unchanging.

Shockingly, that’s not the case. Researchers have discovered that memory is changeable. The act of recalling something alters it.

Forming memories actually causes a physical change in the brain — a seismic discovery made by Nobel Prize-winning ­neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia University. When you create a memory, new synaptic connections grow between neurons in the brain. But each time you call up a memory, it must then be resaved like a file on your computer — and it gets modified in the process.

[SNIP]

Dutch psychology professor Merel Kindt has seemingly found a way to erase the emotional anxiety associated with bad memories without erasing the memories themselves.

Working with arachnophobes, she discovered that subjects who were given a drug called ­propanolol after being exposed to a spider were later able to handle the creatures without fear. The drug is believed to change the way a memory (in this case, terror associated with spiders) is resaved in the brain after being accessed.

[tired&retired]

No thanks to me. All thanks should always go upward.

The secret ingredient necessary to step out of the loop of repeating difficult patterns in relationships is prayer.

[tired&retired]

The really interesting thing I have found is that healing the earliest wound automatically heals all similar wounds that have occurred during a person’s life. They drop away like dominoes falling, instantly.

This is especially true when the perceptual programming event was the feeling of rejection felt by a baby who was put up for adoption. Memories start at conception. I can even tell what the mother thought of the father while the child was in the mother’s womb, even if that child is now 70 years old!

I do quite a bit of work with parents or spouses disabled by the grief of losing a child or mate. Usually the grief can be healed in a few minutes permanently without even discussing the loss they are thinking about. I have found the same to be true of PTSD.