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BODY ODD

OCT 19 2012, 12:33 PM ET

How our brains work to erase bad
memories
by MEGHAN HOLOHAN

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Got a bad memory? The brain has a unique way of helping you forget. " FeaturePics Stock
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Say you’re on a date and you trip and fall so your dress rides up and he sees
& Print
your underwear. Or your boss tells you that for the third year in the row there
will be no raises. Both of these experiences feel uncomfortable, but what do
you do to forget these awkward memories? Researchers found that we use two
different ways -- suppression or substitution -- to avoid thinking of
uncomfortable or unhappy memories.

“We assume that, in everyday life, healthy people will use a mixture of both
mechanisms to prevent an unwanted memory from coming to mind,” says
Roland Benoit, a scientist at the Medical Research Council, Cognition and Brain
Sciences Unit at University of Cambridge, via email. “We did not know whether
the processes of direct suppression and thought substitution can be isolated,
and which, if any of them, would actually cause forgetting.”

Roland and his co-author, Michael Anderson, asked 36 adults to participate in a

memory exercise where half suppressed memories and the other half
substituted new memories. The researchers hoped to understand how we
voluntarily forget and how it affects general memory. The subjects were tested
during magnetic resonance imaging procedures, or MRIs, allowing the
researchers to observe how the brain works during suppression and
substitution.
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 While both processes cause forgetting, a different region of the brain controls
each one. When people suppress memories, the dorsal prefrontal cortex
inhibits activation in the hippocampus, which plays an important role in
retaining memories.

“It thus effectively breaks the remembering process. This, in turn, disrupts the
memory representations that would be necessary for recalling the unwanted
memory later on,” Benoit explains.

When it comes to substitution, the brain works a bit differently -- the caudal
prefrontal cortex and midventrolateral prefrontal cortex form a network of sorts
that works with the hippocampus to swap out new information with details
people would soon forget.

“By just looking at how well people forgot memories, you couldn’t tell whether
they had done direct suppression or thought substitution,” Benoit says. “These
mechanisms are based on different brain systems that work in opposite
fashion: One (direct suppression) by ‘slamming the mental break’ to stop the
remembering process and the other (thought substitution) by steering the
remembering process towards a substitute memory.”

Even though people exploit both to forget those nagging, unwanted memories,
actively overlooking unpleasant events can negatively impact how we
remember. But Benoit notes that learning how people deal with unwanted
memories helps them understand how people with traumatic memories, such
as PTSD sufferers, cope with remembering.

“It is perfectly natural for people, upon encountering an unwelcome reminder, to

try to put the unpleasant reminding out of mind. We all have experienced this.
Intuitively, it feels as though we solved this problem.”

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