Forgetting articles from across Nature Portfolio

A brain stimulation study (tDCS) on healthy humans shows that the medial prefrontal cortex plays a causal role in learning social hierarchical relationships by observation.

Directed forgetting can be used to disrupt emotional memories. In a fear conditioning paradigm, participants had poorer recognition and recall, and developed lower physiological responses to images paired with an electric shock when instructed to forget them.

Memory loss is a known result of cholinergic dysfunction, yet the neural basis for this effect remains unknown. Here, the authors demonstrate that the way cholinergic blockade disrupts memory is by impairing the amplitude and timing of theta oscillations.

A population of hypothalamic neurons that are active during REM sleep are involved in forgetting.

Noninvasive delivery of alternating electrical currents to temporal and prefrontal brain regions improves working memory and reverses age-related changes in brain dynamics in the elderly, report Reinhart and Nguyen in this issue of Nature Neuroscience. They also report a similar effect in young adults with poor working memory performance.