{"id":139204,"date":"2022-05-11T19:22:35","date_gmt":"2022-05-12T00:22:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/05\/the-brain-has-a-built-in-system-to-keep-unwanted-memories-out-study-finds"},"modified":"2022-05-11T19:22:35","modified_gmt":"2022-05-12T00:22:35","slug":"the-brain-has-a-built-in-system-to-keep-unwanted-memories-out-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/05\/the-brain-has-a-built-in-system-to-keep-unwanted-memories-out-study-finds","title":{"rendered":"The Brain Has a Built-in System to Keep Unwanted Memories Out, Study Finds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-brain-has-a-built-in-system-to-keep-unwanted-memories-out-study-finds3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.jneurosci.org\/content\/early\/2022\/04\/06\/JNEUROSCI.1711-21.2022\">A new study<\/a> in the <i>Journal of Neuroscience<\/i> has some answers. By scanning the brains of 24 people actively suppressing a particular memory, the team found a neural circuit that detects, inhibits, and eventually erodes intrusive memories.<\/p>\n<p>A trio of brain structures makes up this alarm system. At the heart is the dACC (for \u201cdorsal anterior cingulate cortex\u201d), a scarf-like structure that wraps around deeper brain regions near the forehead. It acts like an intelligence agency: it monitors neural circuits for intrusive memories, and upon discovery, alerts the \u201cexecutive\u201d region of the <a href=\"https:\/\/singularityhub.com\/2022\/03\/01\/new-brain-map-charts-every-component-in-the-biological-universe\/\">brain<\/a>. The executive then sends out an abort signal to the brain\u2019s memory center, the hippocampus. Like an emergency stop button, this stops the hippocampus from retrieving the memory.<\/p>\n<p>The entire process happens below our consciousness, suppressing unwanted memories so that they never surface to awareness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new study in the Journal of Neuroscience has some answers. By scanning the brains of 24 people actively suppressing a particular memory, the team found a neural circuit that detects, inhibits, and eventually erodes intrusive memories. A trio of brain structures makes up this alarm system. At the heart is the dACC (for \u201cdorsal [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-139204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}