Remembering the highs and the lows

I wish I could take a tablet that helped my trading memories hang around for longer. It might help to prevent the costly practice of repeating one’s mistakes.

We are still some way of such a wonder drug, but there are some new developments on this frontier: the Economist has just published an interesting article shedding new light on how we remember emotionally charged events. Apparantly, this is the work of the a2b-adrenoceptor, which is stationed in the amygdala in the brain. However, the gene that encodes the a2b-adrenoceptor comes in two varieties and those with the rarer variety seem to have a much better recall of emotionally charged events than those with the normal variety of the gene.