The neuroscientist working on ‘zapping’ away unwanted memories
“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” might not be fiction for much longer, if memory researcher Steve Ramirez gets his way.
Tony Ho Tran | June 17, 2025Think of your happiest memory. A wedding, your child’s birth, or maybe just a perfect night out with friends. Sit with it for a moment. Remember the details. What were you wearing? What did it smell like? How did it make you feel?
Now do the opposite. Think of a sad memory—the loss of a loved one, getting laid off, or a painful breakup. Sit with this one too.
Which would you rather keep?
Of course, you want the happy memory, the one that made you feel good and joyful about life. Yet, the painful ones linger for years and sometimes decades, like bruises beneath the surface. If you could choose, would you keep them—or delete them entirely?
If this is all starting to sound like something out of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Inception, you wouldn’t be too far off—and Steve Ramirez would agree with you. Ramirez is a neuroscientist at Boston University and National Geographic Explorer whose research occurs on the bleeding edge of memory science. He’s perhaps best known for studies he helped conduct that showed that it was possible to implant a false memory in mice. The findings were published in the journal Science in 2013 and the Royal Society in 2014.
His research is built on a central truth: Memory is fickle. It changes and morphs every time we recall it. Ramirez compares it to hitting “Save As” on a Word document. Everytime we retrieve a memory, we change it slightly. Ramirez is exploring whether we can harness that “Save As” process—intentionally rewriting our memories instead of letting them change by accident. So far, he’s figured out how to do something even more surprising: not destroy a bad memory, but create a new one. . . .
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/health/article/memory-cells-laser-hippocampus
I saw this in a movie once. In fact, I've seen this in several movies. As George Orwell famously wrote:
He who controls the present controls the past.
He who controls the past controls the future.
