அவள் ஒரு பச்சைக்குழந்தை - Aval Oru Pachai Kulanthai - YouTube - Google-N...

அவள் ஒரு பச்சைக்குழந்தை - Aval Oru Pachai Kulanthai - YouTube - Google - Nee Oru Maharani - Sankar Ganesh - Jai Shankar , Sujatha ,Sripriya - S.P. Balasubramaniam - P. Susheela 

Ways to erase unhappy memories

We all have things we'd like to forget - being the victim of a crime, a bad relationship, an embarrassing faux pas. What if we could erase those bad memories? Or at least take the edge off them?

"We don't remember everything, only bits and pieces," says Jason Chan, an assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University. "We take these pieces (when we recall a memory) and reconstruct a story that makes sense to us. But it might not be correct."

Those memories can also be altered. Writing on the Scientific American Blog Network earlier this year, neuroscientist R. Douglas Fields explained that when a specific memory is recalled, it is vulnerable to being altered or even extinguished for a certain period of time."

There are other methods of altering memories. Certain drugs, protein inhibitors, have been shown to make memories more malleable. Electric shocks to the brain can also erase certain memories, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have found a gene that can help with memory extinction. Even alcohol can do the job. Chan says that alcohol affects the memory formation mechanism. Research continues in all these areas.

Research shows brain's predictive nature when listening to others

Our brain activity is more similar to that of speakers we are listening to when we can predict what they are going to say, a team of neuroscientists has found. The study, which appears in the Journal of Neuroscience, provides fresh evidence on the brain's role in communication.

"Traditionally, it was thought that our brains always process the world around us from the "bottom up"—when we hear someone speak, our auditory cortex first processes the sounds, and then other areas in the brain put those sounds together into words and then sentences and larger discourse units. From here, we derive meaning and an understanding of the content of what is said to us.

However, in recent years, many neuroscientists have shifted to a "top-down" view of the brain, which they now see as a "prediction machine": We are constantly anticipating events in the world around us so that we can respond to them quickly and accurately. For example, we can predict words and sounds based on context—and our brain takes advantage of this. For instance, when we hear "Grass is…" we can easily predict "green."

White matter fiber architecture of the brain. Credit: Human Connectome Project.