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POPSSelectively Deleting Memories "One thing that we're really intrigued by is that this is a selective erasure," Tsien says. "We know that erasure occurred very quickly, and was initiated by the recall itself." "But people are very interested in devising a way where you could come up with a drug to expedite a way to do that," he says. That kind of treatment could change a memory by scrambling things up just in the neurons that are active during the specific act of the specific recollection. "That would be a very powerful thing," Mayford says. But the puzzle is an incredibly complex one, and getting to that point will take a vast amount of additional research. "Human memory is so complicated, and we are just barely at the foot of the mountain," Tsien says.