If you had the chance to erase your worst, most painful memories, would you do it?

New research published in the journal Current Biology by neuroscientists from the Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and McGill University suggests that this may someday be possible, bringing us closer to the reality of manipulating the recollection of our pasts.

Basically, by deactivating the proteins that have encoded memories into your brain, you could theoretically restore the neural state that preceded a traumatic memory. Not only would you forget what happened, but your brain wouldn’t even have the infrastructure to recall the memory anymore.

Memories are believed to form at neural synapses, the sites where electrical impulses are passed back and forth between neurons. Changes in these neural synapses can both strengthen and weaken memories. Protein kinase M molecules (PKM) are an essential part of memory formation that can be activated by external stimulation, such as a traumatic event.

“They amplify whatever the external signal was to create internal change that can last from minutes to decades,” Samuel Schacher, a professor of neuroscience at CUMC and co-author of the study, told Seeker.

These PKMs are guarded by another protein, KIBRA, that allows them to remain constantly active — thereby keeping a memory alive. But the research team’s findings show that a disruption either to the PKMs or the KIBRA proteins that protect them can produce a partial or complete memory erasure.

“When the activity of this [PKM] molecule is inhibited, the synaptic strength returns to its previous value and the memory is erased,” said Wayne Sossin, a neuroscientist at McGill and another member of the team, in an email.

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But not all memories are the same. The researchers discussed two types of memories in their paper: associative memories and non-associative memories.

Schacher likes to give the following example: You’re cutting through a dark alley in a high-crime neighborhood when you suddenly get violently mugged. You see a mailbox sometime during or immediately following the assault. You might have two residual sources of fear: dark alleys, and mailboxes. One of those fears — which links the dark alley with the risk of crime — is associative. That’s a good memory to have, because it may make you more wary. But the fear of mailboxes — the non-associative memory — isn’t important, and could hinder you in the future.

Such incidental non-associative memories, Schacher said, might be helpful to have erased.