By Fiona Macrae
Forgetting an unhappy love affair or a traumatic accident could soon be as easy as popping a pill.
At the risk of being accused of developing a pill for everything, scientists have discovered a drug that helps numb the pain of bad memories by flooding the mind with feelings of security and safety.
And the technique could one day be used to cure phobia sufferers of their fears, help soldiers recover from the horrors of battle or allow accident victims to put their trauma behind them.
To test the effectiveness of the drug, researchers created bad memories by giving mice electric shocks while a loud noise was played.
Over time, the creatures learned to associate the sound with the shock, and hearing the noise alone was enough to make them freeze.
But when they were given a drug called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, they lost their fear, the journal Science reports.
The effect of the drug was similar to a psychological technique called extinction training, in which phobia sufferers are repeatedly exposed to their nemesis in a bid to desensitise them to it. Read more…
