Sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder sometimes undergo a treatment in which they re-experience a fearful memory in a safe place, with the hope that their brains will rewrite the memory so it no longer triggers them. But this therapy doesn’t always work and its effects may not last, especially if the memory is years old. MIT neuroscientists, including Picower Institute for Learning and Memory director Li-Huei Tsai, have shown they can lessen traumatic memories in mice when pairing the behavioral therapy with a dose of a drug that that makes the brain more malleable. “Our experiments really strongly argue that either the old memories are permanently being modified, or a new much more potent memory is formed that completely overwrites the old memory,” Tsai told the MIT News.

Explore Professor Tsai’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.