« Googley treats for Goose Creek | Main | And now for the enterprise ... »

Remembering to forget

October 22, 2008

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."

Technology Review provides further details on the study:

[The researchers] first put the mice in a chamber where the animals heard a tone, then followed up the tone with a mild shock. The resulting associations: the chamber is a very bad place, and the tone foretells miserable things. Then, a month later - enough time to ensure that the mice's long-term memory had been consolidated - the researchers placed the animals in a totally different chamber, overexpressed the protein, and played the tone. The mice showed no fear of the shock-associated sound. But these same mice, when placed in the original shock chamber, showed a classic fear response. [The chemical] had, in effect, erased one part of the memory (the one associated with the tone recall) while leaving the other intact.

Fiddling with mice brains is one thing, of course, and fiddling with human brains is another. But the experiment points to the possibility of the eventual development of a precise and quick method for manipulating people's memories:

"The study is quite interesting from a number of points of view," says Mark Mayford, who studies the molecular basis of memory at the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, CA. He notes that current treatments for memory "extinction" consist of very long-term therapy, in which patients are asked to recall fearful memories in safe situations, with the hope that the connection between the fear and the memory will gradually weaken.
"But people are very interested in devising a way where you could come up with a drug to expedite a way to do that," he says. That kind of treatment could change a memory by scrambling things up just in the neurons that are active during the specific act of the specific recollection. "That would be a very powerful thing," Mayford says.

Indeed. One can think of a whole range of applications, from the therapeutic to the cosmetic to the political.

Posted by nick at October 22, 2008 05:56 PM

Comments

This is one of the consequences of considering human beings as digital entities. On the biological level we are seens as a DNA codde and on the psychic levele as a bunch of neurons to be fixed and perhaps upgraded. What is missing from the whole idea of manipulating memories is exactly what is still elusive to science: consciousness. Our deep awareness of our psyche, through analysis or meditation or any other "low-tech tool" can make our brain plastic and can overcome traumas and unpleasant memories too, but in the meanwhile we keep the awareness of those. Through external chemicals maybe we can go beyond memories, but through awareness we can go beyond them.

Posted by: Ivo at October 23, 2008 02:04 AM

We are getting very close to what was considered only science fiction or a fable years ago, the idea presented to all of us in "Brave New World", by Aldous Huxley... By the way, what warranties have we got that only our unpleasant memories will be erased? By the way isn´t it the contrary that is happening on regarding the supercomputer... More information, more memories, more knowledge and so on to enlarge its capabilities and reach Artificial Intelligency?

Posted by: JOÃO LUÍS DE ALMEIDA MACHADO at October 23, 2008 06:58 AM

My question is : is this very different from when we started (centuries ago) to practice surgery ?

Then we started playing with the body, and now, we continue playing with the body but go one step further. Playing with the brain is just going one step further into a path along which we started a long time ago.

Posted by: Luis at October 23, 2008 12:45 PM

Remembering to forget

October 22, 2008

Comments

Post a comment

Greatest hits

Other writing

Rough Type is: