Erasing Memories
By Walter Glannon, PhD Walter Glannon, PhD , is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Bioethics and the Brain (Oxford, 2007) and Brain, Body and Mind: Neuroethics with a Human Face (Oxford, 2011) and editor of Free Will and the Brain: Neuroscientific, Philosophical and Legal Perspectives (Cambridge, 2015). Neuroscientists can measure changes in the brain associated with different types of memory. Recent experiments on rodents have shown that memories can be manipulated. In one experiment, researchers implanted a false fear memory in a mouse brain, causing it to elicit a fear response to a stimulus to which it was not actually exposed [1]. In a different experiment, researchers electrically stimulated place cells in a mouse hippocampus as well as cells in the reward system during sleep. This induced learned behavior where mice linked a specific location to a reward [2]. This type of manipulation may eventually serve a therapeutic purpos...