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Did you hear or read something that you no longer want to know? Just remove it from your brain. Yes, apparently it's as simple as that.

Researchers have recently revealed that people can consciously remove specific information from their memories by "dampening the brain circuits that initially stored it."

Jiangang Shan and Bradley Postle, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are the experts behind the study, which looked at how the brain actively removes memory content it doesn't need.

Their paper, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, explains how they got 30 participants to perform a memory task while recording their brain activity. The group was first given two items to remember.

"Experimental conditions either did or did not encourage participants to actively remove the memory of one of these items. Following these conditions, they were given a third item to remember," reports Neuroscience News. "Finally, participants were tested on their memory of the relevant first and final items."

The researchers found that the brain uses a "mechanism" to consciously remove information from a memory. "Brain scans showed that removing memory content involves reduced excitability in the neural circuits tied to the unwanted information," explains the site.