Recall a memory under certain circumstances, and the brain might erase it, recent rodent research suggests. If that possibility seems like science fiction, consider other weird tricks played by the mind's memory machinery. False recollections, for example, can occur during a déjà vu experience or after hypnosis. And true recollections which can reconstruct experiences from decades earlier, often seem almost supernatural, even to those fully aware of the brain's complexity.
Because of its surpassing strangeness, memory has long frustrated philosophical and literary attempts to rationalize and describe it. Now, neuroscientists hope to explain how memory works, and they are deploying some of molecular biology's newest tools and experimental psychology's oldest methods in their quest. But the ultimate focus of recollection research, the memory trace, still resists intricate measurement and manipulation. As a result, the field progresses slowly, igniting intense, seemingly irresolvable controversies as it edges forward. A case in point ...
