I found this one just a few short minutes ago and thought I’d blog about it. It’s one of those wonderful 60-second science things by Scientific American. The article : Freeing The Mind To Forget.

Well I just had to read it, because it’s a fascinating title, I mean wouldn’t that be great if we could just forget the bad things around us?

In the article, it explains the difference between young and old brains and came up with :

They found that in adult brains, a physical net forms around certain cells in the amygdala, a structure associated with emotional memories.

What does that mean? It means that all those things that happen to you that are traumatic or painful, will be almost sculpted into your mind. It means that you can’t let go of the things that cause you any amount of grief or pain depending on the level of the cells that have the net formed around them. Kinda.

Suddenly I’m understanding why my kittens aren’t understanding a swat on the butt to mean ‘No. That’s bad!’, their brain cells are much more flexible and don’t have that coating yet is what I would assume.

And one day in the future…hopefully…we can go get a little bit of stuff dripped onto our cells and we can forget our pain too, but hopefully it only diminishes it so we still remember what we learned from the pain.

You can check out the small article Freeing The Mind To Forget at Scientific American.