Steve Ramirez, "How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Jan 19, 2026

Steve Ramirez, a neuroscientist and associate professor at Boston University, is making waves with his groundbreaking research on memory manipulation. He discusses his journey from creating false memories in the lab to envisioning a future where we can replace negative memories with positive ones. Ramirez explains how memories are fluid, shaped by context and mood, and the ethical implications of altering them. He also highlights the potential for activating positive memories to treat depression, raising questions about how such changes could redefine our identities.

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INSIGHT

Recalling A Memory Edits It

Every act of recollection reconstructs and can alter a memory's content like applying a new filter.
Mood, context, and current experience bias what gets rewritten during recall.

INSIGHT

Triggers Flick The Memory Dominoes

Triggers (external or internal) flick on subsets of cells that start a chain reaction to recall a memory.
Different triggers can access overlapping or different memories depending on which cells activate.

ANECDOTE

Night In Times Square Sparked A False-Memory Test

Ramirez and Shu labeled cells tied to a neutral context and later activated them with light to implant fear in mice.
The mice later showed fear in the original neutral box despite no real negative event there.

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As a graduate student at MIT, Steve Ramirez successfully created false memories in the lab. Now, as a neuroscientist working at the frontiers of brain science, he foresees a future where we can replace our negative memories with positive ones. In How to Change a Memory, Ramirez draws on his own memories--of friendship, family, loss, and recovery--to reveal how memory can be turned on and off like a switch, edited, and even constructed from nothing.

A future in which we can change our memories of the past may seem improbable, but in fact, the everyday act of remembering is one of transformation. Intentionally editing memory to improve our lives takes advantage of the brain's natural capacity for change.

In How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past (Princeton UP, 2025), Ramirez explores how scientists discovered that memories are fluid--they change over time, can be erased, reactivated, and even falsely implanted in the lab. Reflecting on his own path as a scientist, he examines how memory manipulation shapes our imagination and sense of self. If we can erase a deeply traumatic memory, would it change who we are? And what would that change mean anyway? Throughout, Ramirez carefully considers the ethics of artificially controlling memory, exploring how we might use this tool responsibly--for both personal healing and the greater good.

A masterful blend of memoir and cutting-edge science, How to Change a Memory explores how neuroscience has reached a critical juncture, where scientists can see the potential of memory manipulation to help people suffering from the debilitating effects of PTSD, anxiety, Alzheimer's, addiction, and a host of other neurological and behavioral disorders.

Steve Ramirez has been featured on CNN, NPR, and the BBC and in leading publications such as The New York Times, National Geographic, Wired, Forbes, The Guardian, The Economist, and Nature. An award-winning neuroscientist who has given TED talks on his groundbreaking work on memory manipulation, he is associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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