New research shows that, contrary to what was previously assumed, suppressing unwanted memories reduces their influence on behaviour, and sheds light on how this process happens in the brain.
The study, published online in PNAS, challenges the idea that suppressed memories remain fully preserved in the brain's unconscious, allowing them to be inadvertently expressed in someone's behaviour. The results of the study suggest instead that the act of suppressing intrusive memories helps to disrupt traces of the memories in the parts of the brain responsible for sensory processing.
The team at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and the University of Cambridge's Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute (BCNI) have examined how suppression affects a memory's unconscious influences in an experiment that focused on suppression of visual memories, as intrusive unwanted memories are often visual in nature.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-03-suppressing-unwanted-memories-unconscious-behavior.html
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