In a small and dark laboratory at the Picower Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a rat sits comfortably in a shine black plastic box. His long white and massive tail impress the visitors. He looks like a hybrid animal coming out of a Star Trek picture. A small metal chip implanted into his minuscule brain delicately deforms his scalp. Through that implant, scientists can record his neurons activity. A deep and intense blow followed by several bips is emitted from the oscilloscope. “Listen, that’s the sound of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Jonathan Whitlock says. Whitlock, who was working at the MIT Picower Institute from 2002 to 2006, alludes to Michel Gondry’s movie in which a fictional company developed a procedure to erase targeted memories. In the film, the patients take a pill and wake up the day after with no memory of the event they have decided to erase. As frightening as it sounds, in today’s neuroscience laboratories reality flirts with fiction.
In the United States, between Cambridge and New York, researchers in neurobiology are developing new techniques to erase rats’ memory. They teach them a specific task, pinpoint the learning mechanism in their brains and reverse it or block it, using electrical patterns or chemistry, to impair the memory that has been formed.
