freud was right. About
people’s ability to repress unwanted memories,
that is. So say researchers led by Michael Anderson
of the University of Oregon and John Gabrieli of Stanford
in the January 9 issue of Science.
The psychologists gave subjects 36 pairs of unrelated
words. While their brains were scanned using functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), subjects were asked
to recall the second word of 12 of the pairs, and not
to recall the second word of another 12. When they tried
to forget a word, their frontal cortex lit up. Afterward,
subjects were less likely to recall pairs they had tried
not to think about than those they had been asked to
remember or than baseline pairs they were not exposed
to during the fMRI.
The “big news,” Gabrieli says, “is
that we’ve shown how the human brain blocks an
unwanted memory, that there is such a mechanism and
it has a biological basis.”
