Many people have memories they'd like to forget. This professor is working to do that — kind of

Lots of us have experienced things in our lives that we’d like to forget. Steve Ramirez is working to make that happen — kind of.

Ramirez is an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University; he’ll be speaking Wednesday at the Mesa Arts Center as part of its National Geographic Live series, at an event called "Untangling the Mind."

Ramirez said there are two main goals of his lab: to try to understand the biology of how we learn and how we remember; and to try to artificially activate or inactivate memories to see what that tells us about how the brain works, in an effort to restore health back to the brain.

Ramirez spoke with The Show to talk about — in layperson’s terms — how one goes about trying to adjust people’s memories.

Full conversation

STEVE RAMIREZ: Yeah, so importantly, our experimental subjects are rodents that we start off with. And they have pretty remarkably evolutionarily conserved brain areas that are involved in learning and memory that we humans also have.

So, the first thing we have to do is go into the brain and try to find the brain cells that hold on to one individual memory, which we've been successfully able to do. And then the second part is to go into the brain, find those brain cells, and then find a way of artificially turning them on or off to see if the animal behaves as though it's recalling a given memory. Which has been also a big success story in our field in the past decade.

And lastly, we think this informs what we can do in the human brain, because we have memory as well, and we know that there's physical correlates of memory in the brain. So, how do we access those memories? One example for me and you would just be through conversation. Like I could ask you: "How was your night yesterday? What was the last vacation you were on?" And then scan your brain and see what kind of magic is happening there.

MARK BRODIE: It almost sounds like, and I don't know if you've seen the movie “Inside Out,” but it kinda sounds like that's what you're working with, where all these memories are in like little glass balls that are just stored somewhere in our brains?

RAMIREZ: Yeah, you know, that's almost exactly how I imagined memory when I first went into the field, which was that there's somehow these biological orbs of information in the brain that hold on to our past experiences. And in a sense, that's true. It's just that those orbs are brain cells and that within those brain cells and across brain cells and how they communicate with each other, that that process can give rise to the process of memory itself.

And maybe one important point here is that in “Inside Out,” you know, there's a scene where they go into the brain and they can pick out one of these orbs, and here's an experience of a happy memory from the past.

... The biggest difference with the human brain, and the rodent brain for that matter, is that any given memory is going to involve all sorts of sights and sounds and smells and emotions and context of where that memory happened.

And in the brain, when you're forming that memory, there's different parts of the brain that are involved in processing the sights and sounds and smells and emotions of that experience. Which is to say that memory is actually this three-dimensional web of activity that's distributed throughout the brain and not necessarily located in one single point in the brain.

BRODIE: So does that mean then that if you are trying to alter someone's memory or change the memory in some way, you have to ... know which aspect of the memory you're trying to deal with, be it sight, smell, voice, something like that. And then sort of know how and where to go about doing that?

RAMIREZ: Right, and we try to control that in the lab as much as possible by giving our rodents very specific experiences. So for example, being put into an experimental box and being given a food reward to form a kind of positive memory. And then we take all of what we know and what we've learned in the last 100 years of neuroscience about how positive memories form in the brain, and that gives us different targets. There's different areas that are specialized in processing, positive experiences or experiences themselves. And that gives us a bit of a hint as to where to begin looking for those cellular correlates of that experience.

BRODIE: I want to mention one of the analogies that you write about, which is that you basically say when we have a memory, when we think about a memory, it's like hitting “save as” on a Microsoft Word document. It's not like an independent video or photo on your phone or something. You're constantly sort of writing and writing over and rewriting a memory. I guess, like, how fluid are our memories?

RAMIREZ: That's a great question. And honestly, I think it's pretty fluid, to answer it scientifically. I mean, I think that there's this aphorism that you can't step in the same river twice. And I think that it's true about memory as well, that we can't recall the exact same memory twice. And it's because, What we're doing at the time of recalling a memory biases, how we recall that memory, and how we're feeling when we recall a memory also biases the contents of the memory that we're recalling.

BRODIE: Does that help explain why two or more people who experience the same event might remember it differently?

RAMIREZ: I think that's exactly what underpins that phenomenon. We hope that our collective experience gets a little bit closer to the truth of what actually happened in the past, but the reality is that we're all probably telling each other unknowingly a bit of a white lie about what actually happened in the past.

BRODIE: So I'm curious how you think about sort of the morals of adjusting people's memories. Obviously, you know, somebody who's gone through something very traumatic, it would make sense that maybe you want to sort of lessen that memory or adjust it some way. But I wonder, are there instances in which it's maybe not appropriate to do this kind of thing?

RAMIREZ: Without a doubt. ... It's a really important topic to consider here because the way that this can be misused is pretty obvious. And we've had Hollywood kind of hit us over the head for the past decades of how memory manipulation can be misused. So, we have a pretty good idea of all of the ways that this can be bad. And one thing that I really like emphasizing is that real life doesn't necessarily have to be like Hollywood or sci-fi. That we can think of all of the good that can be done with this if we're strategic about it and have an ethically-bounded goal in sight.

So, for example, memory manipulation sounds sinister — as it should. And I'd like to think that if we have the ethically bounded goal of changing memories for the stake of restoring health and well-being to an individual, then we have a goal. Now, suddenly, this can be part of the toolkit that we have to address psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. If we can keep memory alteration in a clinical and medical setting, then we can give it to the person that's suffering from a given psychiatric disorder or a given degenerative disorder rather than having it be this kind of recreational thing that can be used and abused without really knowing what the side effects are for that matter.

BRODIE: Right. Well, is it possible, do you think, to manipulate or adjust a memory, but still have sort of the lessons that it taught us or, you know, keep the element of that memory that made somebody who they are or led them down a particular path. ... Can you sort of just take out part of it and not all of it?

RAMIREZ: Yes. And I love the way that you phrased it, because that is exactly what experimental neuroscience lets us do. One way I think about this is, anything that we've had in our past that caused us some kind of mental anguish — like let's say even a breakup in high school. Like in the moment, right, it still feels like the end of the world, and it still hurts, and it's still heartbreak. But now I remember that. I went through a breakup in high school and I remember, I can describe how I felt. But I don't necessarily have to relive the really black components of that memory per se. I just know that it happened, it didn't feel great, and I move on with my life.

And presumably I grow from it as well. And that's a kind of what we hope would happen by being able to help an individual or an organism that's had a particularly traumatic experience, for that matter, is to still be able to use that experience and to learn from it. But without the components that might be pushing us more towards a disorder. With, of course, generalized anxiety and PTSD being probably the two most highly occurring examples.