A treatment removes a specific fear memory on purpose

A memory, when recalled, becomes briefly unstable and has to be stored again; a drug given in that window can stop the storing. In rats this erased a learned fear in 2000. In 2009 a Dutch group did it in people: volunteers taught to fear a picture of a spider, given a common blood-pressure drug after recalling it, stopped flinching at the picture the next day and did not start again, while still remembering that the picture had once come with a shock. Later work extended it to people with a real spider phobia. The effect is real in the laboratory and has not become a treatment.

What would count

A specific learned fear, identified in advance, is removed on purpose by a drug or procedure given around its recall, shown by the loss of the fear response to that cue (not merely its weakening through repeated safe exposure) while other memories are intact, in a peer-reviewed report.

Who settles it: Peer-reviewed reports with a control group; a regulator's approval record if a treatment is approved for this use

Where it stands

First human. Reached on 15 February 2009, on the record of doi.org. Could move a stage within 5 to 20 years.

The last reading

Once a week every upgrade is read against the news, against what would count above. Open a line to see what that week held. Every reading of this upgrade is on this week's reading.

• 16 October 2026 Nothing new

  Nothing in the window. A Canadian randomised trial of propranolol after recall of traumatic memories (75 participants) appeared in the European Journal of Psychiatry's July to September 2026 issue; its outcome was not visible in the search and it is a trial, not the regulator's approval the next rung needs. Earlier trials are mixed, as the entry's notes say.

Notes

The charter expected this leaf at shown in animals. The record supports first human: the 2009 Amsterdam report erased a conditioned fear response in healthy volunteers with propranolol given after recall, and a 2015 report from the same group did it in people with a spider phobia, with the change still present three months later. The result has been repeated by the same group and has failed in several published attempts, including one of its own, so the conditions under which it works are unsettled; the record notes that without lowering the rung: the ladder asks whether it has happened, and it has, in a peer-reviewed report with controls. The animal record is the 2000 rat study that first showed a recalled fear memory could be erased by blocking its re-storage.