The Scientists Who Want to Rewire Your Past to Fix the Present

Memories are the language we use to tell the story of our life—an ever-changing language.

In the last several decades, scientists have shown just how malleable our memories really are. We don’t so much recall the past when we remember something; rather, we recall our recollection of the past. And every time we dig back into the crevices of our mind, the details of our remembrances can shift ever so slightly for any number of reasons, including our current emotional state.

Usually, this system works perfectly fine enough. But sometimes, we can conjure up or even be coerced into creating false memories of events that never happened, a phenomenon that’s occasionally fueled moral panics and wrongful convictions.

Scary as all this might sound, some neuroscientists have started to explore the positive implications of our shifting memory. If it’s possible to induce a traumatic false memory in someone, for instance, why not a happy one? Or maybe we can erase real traumatic memories that are greatly contributing to a person’s depression, or at least blunt the emotional toll of those memories. Some people might also benefit from interventions that would allow them to more easily recall happier memories during times of turmoil.

In 2012, Steve Ramirez—a PhD student at the time—and his colleagues at MIT began to publish research that helped propel the now fast-growing field of memory manipulation. They demonstrated that it’s possible to physically and reliably implant a false memory in the brains of lab mice.

In his upcoming book, How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past, Ramirez details the early neuroscience research that made his experiments possible, the leaps and bounds that he and other scientists have made since, and the potential expansive future that lies ahead for the field. The book isn’t just a breezy summary of memory research, though, it’s an engaging and at times heartbreaking telling of Ramirez’s personal journey pursuing this research. At the heart of this journey are the memories of his mentor, research partner, and friend Xu Liu, who unexpectedly died at the age of 37 not long after their professional collaboration at MIT had ended.

Gizmodo reached out to Ramirez to talk about the origins of his book, the ethics of manipulating memory, and why learning about the foibles of remembering has made him an optimist. The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

Ed Cara, Gizmodo: The book is equal parts memory science and memoir. Was this something you set out to do from the get-go, or an idea that emerged along the way as you were writing it?

Steve Ramirez: I have a two-tiered answer.

I knew that I’ve always wanted to write a book. That’s just a childhood dream that I had ever since exploring places like Barnes and Nobles growing up and just getting lost in the bookstore.

I always thought it would be awesome to produce something that one day belongs there. I had no idea really what I would write about; I just knew that it was a goal of mine to write a book in general. And I also grew up really consuming as much nonfiction as possible. So people like Oliver Sacks, Steven Pinker, and Mary Roach. I really loved their approach to book writing.

But admittedly, those kinds of books always left me feeling like, “Man, this all sounds awesome. I just wish I knew a little bit more about the human element that was involved in producing all of the grand discoveries that they talk about in their books.” So I figured when I started writing the book, the only way I could tell this story is from a personal lenses. Because I’m both a person and a scientist.

Usually, the world only tends to see the outcomes of your work, the discoveries or the papers. But the human element part was the one that I always felt was missing, something that’s still very much me. So I wanted to infuse that voice in it as much as possible, so that it could be as authentic as possible. And that admittedly was the hardest part of this whole journey, because that’s the part where I had to really learn to turn complicated thoughts into words, let alone the written word, and into a narrative. But it was also the most rewarding part because I do think that I just gained like a whole new language for conveying my own thoughts and feelings around science, around my friendship with Xu, and around the discoveries we made.

I felt that if I could give the reader as close to a 360 degree view of what it means to be a person doing science, then I produced the kind of book that I was really longing for, so to speak, growing up.

Gizmodo: Can you give us a bird’s eye view of the science surrounding memory manipulation? Just how far have things progressed since the studies that you and Liu conducted over a decade ago?

Ramirez: It’s mind boggling to be honest.

I mention towards the very end of the book about how what started as one paper and one poster with Xu and I has turned into so much more.  We just had a meeting in Ireland this past year that had a couple hundred researchers with dozens and dozens of posters. It’s a whole meeting dedicated to this topic that wasn’t really in existence a decade, a decade and a half, ago. So the field has just become so expansive in both in its techniques and its concepts.

It’s kind of dizzying in all the best ways because I think it’s as close to a mini-renaissance in memory research as we could have hoped for. Not only are there hundreds and hundreds of projects that are focused on trying to manipulate engrams [Author’s note: engrams are considered the physical traces of memory created in the brain] and seeing what we can do with them, but there are now whole generations of new scientists working in the field trying to chip away at this problem of how memory works. So it’s been inspiring and dizzying at the same time to see the field in its heyday.

Just to give a quick glimpse—because the field has been so extraordinarily prolific in the last decade and a half. But what started as our ability to artificially turn on one specific memory in the brain has turned into success story after success story. We’ve been able to restore memories that have started to be lost in all sorts of cases, from amnesia to Alzheimer’s disease to sleep deprivation to addiction. We’re even now activating positive memories in all sorts of contexts, whether it’s models of depression, anxiety, and so on.

Gizmodo: It seems like there will be very real therapeutic applications based on this work soon enough. But I think for many people, this kind of research also evokes Hollywood-inspired fears of mass mind control or other scary futures (Total Recall, Inception, etc). How do we ensure that memory manipulation will be done ethically in people, especially as it starts to reach the medical toolbox?

Ramirez: We have to have an ongoing, fully transparent conversation between everyone. It doesn’t matter if it’s the top floor of the ivory tower, the first floor of the ivory tower, or just the lay audience. Everyone has a stake here, because it has to do with something that presumably everyone has, which is memory. So I think if we continue to have this kind of transparent public-facing dialogue about what memory manipulation can really mean, then I think we can not just use it for the greater good, but we can also establish important seat belts so that to prevent misuse.

We’re definitely not Total Recall-ing or Inception-ing the human brain right now. But we also weren’t genetically engineering embryos 30 years ago, before the Human Genome Project was published. So we want to start this conversation decades in advance, so that if and when we get there, we have the proper seat belts to prevent misuse. And it’s not perfect, but I think that one way we can lean into this is by saying, “Let’s give ourselves some ethically bounded or motivated goal for this kind of research.” And in my opinion, the goal is to understand memory so that we can restore health and wellbeing to an individual, and therefore to people.

So if our goal is to use this to promote human flourishing in any capacity that involves wellbeing and restoring health, then we’re in business because then it means that we could use these kinds of approaches in a clinical setting or in a medicinal setting. So we’re not just wiping away the memories from someone like me, Steve, who can’t get over a high school breakup—because life will teach me how to learn and grow beyond those kinds of events.

But we can use it in a clinical setting for the person who’s really debilitated by any given disorder. We can have a medical framework to work from, in the same way that we wouldn’t prescribe an antidepressant to the whole population of Boston, but we would give it to the person living with depression who really would benefit from it. If health restoration is the goal, then we can at least begin to work with that kind of similar infrastructure, while also trying to prevent misuse.

Gizmodo: Speaking as a journalist who’s investigated how false memories can lead people astray in horrific ways, learning about the fragility of memory has been existentially frightening at times. But it seems like your research has left you with an overall optimistic perspective—a trend I’ve noticed with other memory scientists I’ve chatted with! At least for you, why is that?

Ramirez: I’m glad you asked, because I really do think that it’s shaped my rosy outlook.

I think I have a deep respect for what memory is and for what it can be. And I’ve certainly experienced the highs of memories, sitting with a positive memory and feeling motivated, and the lows of memories, recalling something surrounded by grief or loss that can immediately put me in a more pensive or somber state.

So the fact that memory can do that in just a few seconds without really even breaking a sweat is so—it’s almost awe-inspiring. And I think that throughout my career, especially with the ability to tinker with memories, I’ve just gained such a deep respect for this cognitive faculty that we have that can do amazing things. And I’ve also started to think about it as something that we can imbue with healing properties.

In the big picture, I hope by spreading that kind of deep appreciation for what memory is and can be, that we can all connect a little bit more. Because when I hear from people who are in recovery who are at meetings, those are underpinned by everyone’s memories and lived experiences of the hardships that they’ve had to deal with.

But sharing those kinds of memories immediately connects the room at a really fundamentally human level. And I think that if we all took a step back, I am willing to bet anything that we all have at least one memory we can share that will connect us with practically anyone else in the world. And then suddenly, connection becomes the theme, and then being a little bit more empathetic or sympathetic or tolerant suddenly comes into play.

That’s what gives me the sort of rosy-eyed view of what the world can be, because it’s certainly not a reflection of where the world is now, unfortunately.

Gizmodo: What do you most hope readers can take away from your book?

Ramirez: I hope that they take away that deep appreciation for what memory really can be—its ability to transport us back to the most meaningful moments of our past, or to be used as building blocks to imagine whatever future we want to imagine. That it’s really almost this magical property that our brain has that it endows us with so effortlessly.

On the personal front, I hope that readers take away from it the very human process that doing science actually is like. Because science just produces truths that exist in the pantheon of truths in the world, but the process of getting there is a very topsy-turvy, roller coaster, flawed, and exciting human endeavor. So that I hope this at least paints that picture in a little bit.

At the end of the day, what a reader can really come away with appreciating isn’t just that we have memories, but that we also are all, fortunately and unfortunately, depending on your perspective, destined to become memory.

I think there’s a lot of power in that realization, and that was one way I came to terms with the time I spent with Xu. And I think one way of reconciling, or at least resolving, that hard-to-swallow pill of someday becoming memory is that we live a life that one day might be honored in a similar way as how I am using this book to honor my friend. And that’s a way of addressing not just the more difficult memories of our past, but even honoring our grief and really putting that part of memory at center stage.

So it’s a long-winded answer, but basically I hope that people connect with some of the memories I’ve shared, and maybe they’ll see a little bit of themselves and connect with that as well. Because then there’s a very real human conversation to be had there, one that is less intimidating and more accessible.

How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past is being published by Princeton University Press, and will be available starting November 4.