Forget that you were a drug addict…
Mice selectively removed drug memory
Details are given on the pages of the journal Biological Psychiatry (Young et al., Selective, Retrieval-Independent Disruption of Methamphetamine-Associated Memory by Actin Depolymerization).
Scientists gave methamphetamine to rodents for six days, and this was combined with exposure to various stimuli atypical for life in a standard vivarium. Then the researchers waited for two more days, during which the memory underwent a process of molecular rearrangements and was fixed, and then a drug causing actin depolymerization was injected into the amygdala (a structure whose role in memory formation has long been known to biologists).
Actin is one of the proteins from which the cytoskeleton, the cell framework, is formed. Recent studies carried out by other teams of neuroscientists have shown that the restructuring of the cytoskeleton in the area of axons, contacts with other neurons plays an important role in the consolidation of memory: therefore, scientists have suggested that the destruction of actin will lead to the erasure of newly formed memory.
These expectations were generally met. Mice who received the drug stopped spending more time in the compartments of the cell where they received the drug the very next day. In another experiment, the drug was given out after the animals pressed the pedal and after the introduction of a substance destroying actin filaments, the rodents put less pressure on the pedal compared to the control group: from all these data, the destruction of drug-related memory followed.
But this, according to the researchers, is not the most important, since the fundamental possibility of erasing newly formed memory by selective (or not very selective) influence on molecular processes in nerve cells was shown in the middle of the last century. Experts conducted another experiment where mice also moved around a cage with two different compartments and in one of them received a reward, but not in the form of a drug, but in the form of food. The formed association with one of the compartments after administration of a drug that disrupts the synthesis of the actin skeleton of neurons did not suffer: thus, scientists have found a way to selectively erase the memory associated with the drug.
According to the authors of the study, this discovery may help in the search for drugs that help eliminate drug addiction. The same experiments on humans are difficult in the near future due to a number of obvious limitations (mice, for example, were injected directly into the brain), but narcologists have received evidence that "narcotic" memory is formed separately from all other memories and it can be erased without provoking total retrograde amnesia in the patient.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru12.09.2013