Science Is Making It Possible To Erase Memories
If you were given a choice to remove some of the worst memories of your life, would you take it? Would you choose to forget the horrible experiences of your life and the memories associated with them so that you could live a better life?
That may sound like a hypothetical question but in the not so distant future, it will be a very real one. Scientists are edging closer and closer to give humanity the ability of deleting past memories.
If you have watched the supernatural drama “The Vampire Diaries”, you probably understand that it is similar to the way vampires in the show are able to make someone forget about something. Only, in real life, no vampires are needed and only a protein-inhibitor will do the job.
First, How Do We Make Memories?
Image: Brain Cells (Neurons)
There are a lot of things that we still do not understand about our own brains but scientists work day and night to change that. One of the things that has puzzled them is how we make and store memories.
After years of research, we have some understanding about it and we have come to know that the process of creating and recalling memories is an activity that uses our whole brains and involves different circuitry of neurons.
Basically, when we are creating a memory, any number of neurons can fire up in our brains and it might happen in any pattern. While recalling it later, the same pattern and number of neurons are activated and that’s how we recall that particular memory.
But memory storage is also an ongoing process. So, whenever we are recalling past memories, we are actually forming new connections and reconstructing those memories. This also results in a slight change of the memories themselves.
All this is facilitated by specific proteins in the brain. This gave scientists an idea to delete memories.
Erasing Memories
Since the process of recollection makes use of specific proteins, scientists theorised that using protein inhibitors should be able to stop the recalling process. They tested this theory in fish and mice and turns out, they were able to erase their memories.
The experiment with mice should clear things up as to how they made this possible. They placed mice in a chamber and played a specific tone before shocking them. They repeated it until mice started associating the tone with an electric shock.
Later, whenever the tone was played, the mice would get stressed as they ‘remembered’ that a shock was to follow. This means they had successfully created a memory in the mice. Now it was time to delete it.
For this, they now played the tone but administered the protein inhibitors in the mice and to their amazement, the mice showed no signs of fear. They had successfully deleted the memories of the mice.
Implications for Humans
Human trials are still a ways off but if this is able to be adapted for us, it would be a huge deal for the field of medicine. It could be used for post traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) to help patients forget about the haunting memories. Also, it could be very useful to treat addicts by removing their memories of addiction.
In a more distant future, maybe it will be available to anyone wishing to forget any particular memories of their lives to deal with their emotions and feelings associated with those memories. There would be laws regarding this of course but this could very happen.
The future gets stranger by the day.
Image Credits 1
What immediately pops into my mind is that we are tool users. We like to demonize tools, but really it is us the tool users that are the "demons" when ill comes by use of a tool. What I am getting at is that through no fault of the tool we tend to use them for both good and bad.
So while there may be good uses for the tool there are also very bad and nefarious uses.
I'd say the need to get rid of a traumatic memory might be needed in some extreme rare cases, but we also learn from these. They are important to our empathy, so unless there is a very debilitating event occurring due to the memory then erasing REALITY is not necessarily a good idea.
The nefarious implications of this technology though are pretty staggering.
We can erase memories. That could be very bad. The idea of "witnesses" could be put at extreme risk.
Now let's go a little further. If we can erase them, are we far from being able to create or write memories?
Wow... that could be dark.
You are right. We have always proved that we are capable of using any technology for good and bad. It really comes down to the motives and agenda of people involved and I agree that this particular tool can easily be used to wipe off the memory of an entire population especially by a government. I wonder if they already have it and have used it before.
It certainly is dark!
I believe the times when this would actually be a good thing are VERY rare. Like I said it shouldn't be a matter of just wanting to erase memories. Those negative memories and learning to deal with them are important. The rare cases would be in cases where it is debilitating, or a person without a doubt is going to commit suicide if it remains. Things like that.
Yet like I said that is pretty rare. I consider any other use of this tool to be a very dark thing.
You are right. Negative experiences are equally important for life as the positive ones.
Very true, @dwinblood. Our experiences whether good or bad builds our character and makes us who we are today. We often feel we can do without some of the negative experiences, but after some time has gone by, we can look back and appreciate the knowledge we have gained.
Exactly. It's the negatives in life that provide a lot of valuable lessons for our entire lives. I think that if life was only always happy, that happiness wouldn't have any meaning. It is only because we know sadness, that we know happiness.
Not only that. It also can turn our reality into a lie. If we simply erase the things we don't remember then we are selectively altering history. It could make us believe a total lie simply due to the fact a very important piece of information that put it into proper context no longer existed. We see this a lot in the news. Yet this could become the reality.
The more I think about this the more I believe that there are RARE cases where this could save someone's life and be positive. However, most of the uses for this tool I believe are overwhelmingly negative things. Kind of scary actually.
A society full of people who lose empathy due to simply erasing the things that would leave them memories to relate to the pain and sorrow of others. A society full of people who have no idea that their memory of an event in history has been completely altered by deleting important contextual memories. Scary stuff.
Sounds interesting, sure if it was this easy we will all sign up for it. Thank you, I enjoyed reading this post.
Yeah, I am sure a lot of people would go for it. Some memories are just to painful to keep carrying on. Thanks for reading :)
This would be absolutely brilliant if they could pinpoint certain memories and delete this from someone's mind...especially with PTSD. I can think of a few memories I would like to have deleted as well...lol
Yes, yet consider this. Have you learned to live with those memories? With your negative memories that you have survived do not those memories help you have empathy for others when you see them experiencing a similar thing.
PTSD is a good example actually. PTSD tends to happen being exposed to some really bad and traumatic events. What would happen if people never had to worry about PTSD? Would this mean those really bad and traumatic events never happened, or would they happen and people simply don't remember them?
Would this make it very easy to order people to do VERY bad things and they might not even remotely hesitate, because their memory of doing the bad thing can simply be erased?
Over time would reality even be what any of us think it is? We likely would lose tons of contextual information.
I think this could SAVE some people, but they are very rare. I am talking about people that you absolutely know are not going to work through it and are either going to commit suicide as quickly as you stop watching them, or spend their life in a mental hospital.
Those are cases where it might be beneficial. Yet I believe the negative implications of this technology are absolutely staggering.
Yes, under this method, they can delete a particular memory.
Flagged for too high reward. I have better quality and get less
A jealousy flag? ...Does that help the overall system? (<---actual question. I don't know. Maybe it does.)
I do see that you get a fair amount of upvotes without much payout. I've noticed this a lot and haven't taken the time to understand it. Is it just due to their voters having more steem power than yours?
In any case, the argument about quality is pretty subjective. Maybe even a bit childish? You might even be a good writer, but I'm inclined not to follow you based on your apparent principles. Good luck though. Both with future earnings and the jealousy flagging campaign.
I hope that it helps to make the system better. The feature to flag posts which get too much reward was not invented by me but since it's there I use it. Let's see what happens.
I don't think that you should judge what my intentions are.
Fair enough. Judgment retracted. But the comparison of content quality is still entirely subjective. I happened to find it interesting. Perhaps more so than the topics you write about (which is by no means a knock on your content, just my subjective preference for contrast). But I do see where you're coming from now from a purely effort-reward ratio perspective.
My post also has a long life. Thank you.
Anyone seen/remember the movie, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" with Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet? It's a great flick about precisely this concept (and associated problems). Worth a watch.
Also, natural entheogens (non-synthetic psychedelics) have been proven capable of healing PTSD, helping people to quit even the hardest of drugs cold turkey and never go back, etc. while still keeping their memories and everything about their person in-tact!
This will sound a lot more believable when one takes into consideration the monetary effect it would have on big pharma (or really, the consumer-model of medicine in any capacity, as sometimes a single session with Ayahuasca, Psilocybin, or DMT will correct the problem for the rest of the individual's life, as opposed to ensuring that they perpetually need a refill.
Just look how hard they've tried to come against Kratom because it gets people off opiates:
http://reset.me/story/dea-kratom-ban-creates-outrage-people-will-die/
In any case, I've gotta side with @dwinblood on this one. The science fascinates the pants off of me, but if the source code (my pet name for the universe) already provides us with patches for the glitches we incur, deleting elements of our overall system seems like a very poorly thought out "solution" with overwhelmingly more potential for bad than for good.
It's kind of like saying, "the buttons on my web site are dead."
"Just delete them."
"But then I won't be able to link to content on my other pages!"
"Yeah but hey... no more broken buttons!" ;)
Yes, I have watched 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and I thought it was just brilliant! I agree with what you say here in that this is not way to deal with "our glitches" that we suffer from time to time in this Matrix that we live in. But scientists are still pursuing it and by the looks of it, this tech will be ready in the future for human use.
I just hope that it doesn't land into the hands of the evil people. The world would be doomed then.
What was the process for this? Did they administer the protein inhibitor in a targeted area? At the same time as the tone played? Before? How did they target the specific memory of the tone and shock?
As far as I understood, the inhibitors were given just before or just after the sound was played in order to target the particular memory that, that sound invokes in the rats. I am not sure about the targeted area though.
Booze has been doing this for a couple of thousand years. Its about time that science caught up.
LOL!! In that you are right! :D