It failed to bring Jim Carrey happiness in the award-winning film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but scientists have now developed a way to block and even delete unwanted memories from people’s brains.

Researchers have found they can use drugs to wipe away single, specific memories while leaving other memories intact. By injecting an amnesia drug at the right time, when a subject was recalling a particular thought, neuro-scientists discovered they could disrupt the way the memory is stored and even make it disappear.

The research has, however, sparked concern among parliamentary advisers who insist that new regulations are now needed to control the use of the drugs to prevent them becoming used by healthy people as a “quick fix”.

But the US scientists behind the research insist that amnesia drugs could be invaluable in treating patients with psychiatric disorders such as post-traumatic stress.

In a new study, revealed in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, psychiatrists at McGill University, in Montreal, and Harvard University, in Boston, used an amnesia drug to “dampen” the memories of trauma victims.

Prof Karim Nader, of McGill University, said: “When you remember old memories they can become ‘unstored’ and then have to be ‘restored’.

“As the memory is getting restored, we gave patients a drug that turns down the emotional part of the memory. It left the conscious part of the memory intact, so they could still remember all the details but without being overwhelmed by the memory.”

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