Brian Rock, a consulting clinical psychologist at Soke, agrees. “I don’t think we’re anywhere close to erasing people’s memories, but if you could, how would you know where to start and end? With something like loss or grief, often the pain can come from positive memories of a shared experience rather than negative ones. So how do we even know which memories to erase?” All the experts I spoke with agreed that the benefits of this type of research would be most apparent when used in conjunction with psychological therapies such as trauma-focused CBT or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR). “For psychiatric conditions where memories are a key part of the illness—depression, PTSD, phobias, addiction—a technique like this can shorten the time it takes for treatment to work and make it more effective when used in conjunction with therapy or medication,” Alexander says.