If You Really Want to Forget
It brings to mind the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but with a twist: researchers are working on a way to remove only your bad memories.
Slowly but surely, scientists are getting closer to developing a drug that will allow people to eliminate unpleasant memories. The new issue of Neuron features a report from a group of Chinese scientists who were able to use a chemical - the protein alpha-CaM kinase II - to successfully erase memories from the minds of mice. The memory losses, report the authors, are "not caused by disrupting the retrieval access to the stored information but are, rather, due to the active erasure of the stored memories." The erasure, moreover, "is highly restricted to the memory being retrieved while leaving other memories intact. Therefore, our study reveals a molecular genetic paradigm through which a given memory, such as new or old fear memory, can be rapidly and specifically erased in a controlled and inducible manner in the brain."
This is thought provoking on several levels. I mean, wouldn't you love to be able to erase that which you can't forget and wish you could? Those thoughts and images that you can't help going back to even though they make your heart ache and your blood burn? Sounds wonderful to me.
On the other hand, you'd have to be very careful in selecting which ones to do away with. Memories that are painful today could turn into valuable ones down the road. You wouldn't want to do something in the heat of the moment that you would later regret, like tearing up an old photo in anger and then wishing later that you still had it. Time has a way of smoothing things and dulling pain, even pain you never thought you would get over.
Suppose you did erase a particularly painful one. You might feel relief at first, but I think you'd be left with an uncomfortable hole. Because even though it would feel better not to think about the bad memory, that experience has shaped you simply by living it. The part of you that was marked by it would still exist, only you wouldn't be able to connect who you are now to the proper thing in your past, so it's possible you'd feel unmoored or confused or have a nagging, vague sense of loss that you couldn't identify. I'm not sure that feeling of unease would be worth it.
On another note, I never considered that mice could have unpleasant memories!
Second Dan--"Forget to Remember" mp3 off Bringing Down Goliath (buy)
The Extra Glenns--"Memories" mp3 off Martial Arts Weekend (buy)
Ulrich Schnauss--"Gone Forever (Robin Guthrie Version)" mp3 off Quicksand Memory EP (buy)
image by Jason Mecier
impetus for this post from Andrew Sullivan and his Daily Dish
I know you're right, but god it's tempting isn't it!
If you get rid of it you'll only go and do it again. Hell, when it's still
there you only go and do it again anyway! Pain matters, and unless people
actually want to live an emotionally letterboxed life, with all of the
highs and lows blocked off and just cruising through the blah, it's a
terrible idea.
agnes--i know, in theory it sounds so good!
A mouse's unpleasant memories : "Oh no, no CHEESE!" "Oh no, that trap
almost killed me." "Oh no, how come Tom keeps chasing me?" Should I go on?
;)
It is fascinating stuff. I don't know if you listen to Radio Lab, but if
not you should definitely check out a show they did last year on this
topic. Explores a lot of the weirdness in very interesting ways.
I think the snake that almost ate me is an unpleasant memory.
I'm not sure I like the idea of erasure of memories. They are a part of
who we are no matter how hateful.
I'm doing pretty good at losing memories, good and bad, on my own as the
years go by.
nat--perhaps even, "boy that electric shock sure hurt!" ;-) i wonder how
they did the testing on the poor critters.
Would anyone want to erase a memory if it caused no upsetting emotions?
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