Maybe it was an angry dog lunging for your ankles. Maybe it was the screeching car tires as you stepped into the street to pick up the ball.
Traumatic memories seem forever etched into our brains.
They're not, at least in rats. In Thursday's issue of the journal Nature , researchers showed that every time scary memories are recalled from the memory banks, a new imprint of that memory must be created and stored in the brain. If the results are confirmed and extended to humans, they could lead to new treatments for illnesses like post-traumatic stress disorder. But according to the new results, there's a key difference between computer memory and the brain. When you open a document on a computer, you can crash the computer and still have a backup on the hard drive.