I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

In the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Everyone uses this example of deleting the entirety

of a memory of a breakup. And many people, like 80% of people, would not want the entirety of a

memory deleted since it's forged who we are today and presumably has sculpted our sense of

self and identity over time. So good reason to not want to erase it. We don't have to do that.

We can actually go into very particular corners of the brain and find the cells, for example,

that hold on to the emotional part of a memory and just toggle those cells off so that I still

remember what happened and where it happened and when it happened,

but I don't feel that visceral gut-wrenching feeling in response to it.

That's Steve Ramirez describing experiments he and other neuroscientists have been doing as they look into ways to change a memory.

They've been successful so far only in mice, but the goal is eventually

to help people struggling with PTSD and other mentally crippling disorders. His new book is a

riveting account not only of his research, but also his own struggles with memory after the

death of a close colleague.

This is great to be able to talk with you because you found out such interesting things about memory,

and you explain them in ways that are so personal.

Your book, How to Erase a Memory, you were able to do it with mice.

How do you know that you've erased a mouse's memory?

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, as far as we can tell, we don't know if we've 100% erased

a memory, but we know that we can make it inaccessible so that it's harder for the brain to retrieve

that memory. In mice, at least, the first, like, real convincing demonstration

that this was possible was from 2009 in Sheena Jocelyn's lab at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto

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