A Ray of Light Swaps Bad Memories with Good Thoughts: Study

Your bad memories and experiences can be rewritten as sweet thoughts using a flash of light, finds a study.

Unpleasant events, stress and phobia rob one's peace of mind and a good night' sleep causing an array of mental and physical problems. Victims of war or trauma have difficulty forgetting and erasing bad memories and experience repeated episodes of depression and anxiety. Experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found a new way to switch on happy thoughts and positivity by stimulating brain neurons related to emotions.

Their research involved a group of mice that either received mild electric shocks on the feet to trigger fear or were kept in a cage along with a female mouse to induce happy thoughts. The scientists kept a tab on activities in neurons located in the hippocampus and amygdala, brain regions related to emotions. They gave electric signals to the neurons using light ray shone through their eyes on that sparked brain neurons to swap the emotions caused by the memories. Mice that underwent foot shocks no longer exhibited fear and anxiety while mice that enjoyed sharing the cage with female mice expressed shock.

"Both the hippocampus and the amygdala are considered critical for memory formation. We wanted to know whether the memory was free to associate with positive or negative emotion valences or whether it was fixed with respect to emotion. We also wanted to know at what point in the circuit the valence is assigned to the engram, in the hippocampus or the amygdala," said Roger Redondo, co-author and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reports the Daily Mail.

The authors are reportedly conducting further studies on the same subject to test its benefits on patients suffering from chronic depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

More information is available online in the journal Nature.