Highly read on www.cell.com in October

People call on two different brain mechanisms to suppress unwanted memories.

Roland Benoit and Michael Anderson at the University of Cambridge, UK, asked 36 volunteers to commit a list of words to memory, along with a partner word for each to serve as a reminder. The duo then imaged the volunteers' brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging as the subjects employed different strategies to suppress those memories. When prompted by a reminder word, half tried to suppress the memory of the partnered word, whereas the other half attempted to recall a substitute word.

Both strategies suppressed the memory, but the volunteers engaged distinct neural pathways in the brain for each. The findings may boost understanding of conditions in which the regulation of memory is disturbed, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, the authors say.

Neuron 76, 450–460 (2012)