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Another Way To Erase Memories
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Aug 17, 2007 01:17 PM
from the science-is-cool-i-forget-why dept.
from the science-is-cool-i-forget-why dept.
amigoro writes "Neuroscientists have discovered that long-term memories are not etched in a stable form, like a 'clay tablet,' as once thought. The process is much more dynamic, involving a miniature molecular machine that must run constantly to keep memories going. Jamming the machine briefly can erase long-term memories." A few months back we discussed a similar removal of rat memories by a different method.
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Drug Selectively Removes Rats' Memory 64 comments
rednuhter writes "Nature online is reporting scientists have used drugs to selectively remove one memory while not affecting another.
Musical tones were played to the rats and at the same time the subjects were given a mild electric shock. Half the study group were given the drug (not approved for use in humans) and then the experiment was repeated with a new tone. The following day the rats that had not been given the treatment were afraid of both tones while the treated half were only afraid of the second tone: the memory of fear of the first had been erased."
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I can see the benefits to this technology (Score:5, Funny)
If they get to a point where they are able to target specific memories, for example it could be very helpful to people that have suffered a traumatic event. But from the article it sounds like it's just a plan old memory wiper by switching off a running process, and there's no real control over what gets erased. I suppose that's OK if you really don't mind losing the last couple of years.
I am sure there's a list of negative points that could be made against this technology, I just cant remember what they are.Re:I can see the benefits to this technology (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I can see the benefits to this technology (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm having more and more problems every day remembering most anything...and I have GREAT things I wanna remember. Short term is even worse....
Think they could do research to help us KEEP more in memory?
Re:I can see the benefits to this technology (Score:5, Interesting)
Because these panic attacks happened only once every couple of days, I focused on the time between the attacks. The attacks were precipitated by a fear that they were going to happen, so if I got myself into the wrong frame of mind, and allowed myself to start to panic (a sort of aura would come over my mind as the panic started, like I could feel it descending on me), and if I didn't act quickly to distract myself, there was no hope of getting out of it. So I decided to stop fighting it and just "let it happen", sort of convincing myself that "I survived the last one so I can survive this one". And it helped immensely to realize that even if it did keep happening, it wouldn't kill me (unless I killed myself!), and I would have a couple of days to live relatively normally again. I focused on feeling like it didn't matter that I would panic, like it was something to just get over with and move back on with normal life, and once I was able to convince myself of that, I had a tool to take the edge off of the panic once it started happening. And that was enough to often times prevent the panic attack entirely. And once I could prevent a panic attack once in a while, I gained confidence because I thought "well not only do these panic attacks not matter, they are actually preventable". And once I started gaining that confidence, it became easier and easier to avoid them.
Just as the feedback loop of fear was causing the panic attacks, a feedback loop of confidence (where the confidence caused more confidence because the confidence itself was the tool for preventing the panic attacks) was the solution. Eventually I stopped having the attacks. I did relapse a couple of times throughout my teen years, but only briefly. I also had some months-long duration of minor depression, which I attribute to my brain having to devote so many "feel good" neurons to preventing the attacks, and having less left over to keep my general happiness at a normal level. But by the time I went to college, I was for all intents and purposes over it completely.
I am 35 now and haven't had a panic attack in 10 years or so. Although it does make me a little nervous to talk about in depth, even writing this felt a little like skirting the edge of fear. But I have no doubt that once I move onto the next Slashdot article I will have relaxed my nerves entirely.
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Imagine the practical applications for world peace (Score:4, Funny)
Wow, I'm thinking like a comic-book super-villain!
= 9J =
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Re:I can see the benefits to this technology (Score:5, Insightful)
I can accept we have far too many people with a victim mentality; I can accept that this has a large potential for abuse. I can't say that someone who can't live a normal life because of a traumatic event in the past shouldn't get treatment. Yes it will be a very ethically complex drug even if it worked perfectly, but to deny all uses of the drug? I imagine it might also have some uses in military personel, but... yes, it's a very slippery slope.
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We're not saying "get over it", but it really can't be healthy to just be able to wipe out anything painful in your life any time you like.
Some people would probably end up blanking out huge portions of their lives. You might also lose the ability to make smart choices. If you wiped your memory, you might not know to be cautious in certain situations (or not not trust specific people). As shitty as they can be, your experiences are
Re:I can see the benefits to this technology (Score:5, Funny)
The first rule of Operation Treadstone is you do not remember Operation Treadstone.
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Who are you to say that? (Score:4, Insightful)
What a load of authoritarian claptrap. You sound like the type of person who has had some small measure of success dealing with their own minor past hurts and now has THE ONE TRUE ANSWER for every human being on the planet. Good luck with that.
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I have PTSD and can tell you that I can accept it all I want but there's no way to cope with recurring nightmares and flashbacks triggered by, you guessed it, memories that I would rather have buried and forgotten. The absence of those memories would give me no trigger..no reference point for the brain to repeatedly r
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In order for something like this to be practical, it needs to disrupt reconsolidation. That is, as the theory goes, when a memory is accessed, there is an active process to "re-store" that memory. What would be needed in this treatment is some agent (whether pharmacological or electric or magnetic or whatever) that blocks the reconsolidation process. Then in a clinical setting, that treatment would be delivered, a doctor would guide o
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Paranoia aside finding ways to keep the memories from being lost will be a big boone to the increasing Alzheimer's issue.
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I hope (against all odds) someone makes a decent movie out of your idea.
Re:I can see the benefits to this technology (Score:5, Interesting)
Paranoia aside finding ways to keep the memories from being lost will be a big boone to the increasing Alzheimer's issue.
A story involving precise memory manipulation like this goes beyond mere Manchurian Candidates, you'd be looking at Memento meets Cold War spy movie. Who is the enemy? What do they know? What do they know that you know? What do they know that you used to know that they don't want you to find out? Do they know that you know that they know that you know that they know that you know? I think synapses would be burnt out just trying to cope.
I had a story idea along these lines, not with memories but with not knowing who is who. Humans lack FTL travel but do have FTL communications via ansible. Humanity is spread across thousands of lightyears in millions of communities and a pervasive metaverse keeps society connected. An eccentric character grows tired of remote experiences, even if they are as keen as real life experience, and he decides to go see his favorite star system personally. He purchases a starship, goes into cryo and makes the voyage. He comes to decades later in a system devoid of human life. Everything is in blasted ruin. He logs back into the metaverse and the system is still there, pretty as you please. He investigates and finally discovers that there is a device of unknown origin sitting at the system's ansible junction. It is providing a high fidelity simulation of the entire ruined system, as if it had never been destroyed.
Who destroyed the system? Why did they do it? Where are they going next? How many systems still exist, how many have been wiped out? Is he the last human? The alien infiltrators are already in the metaverse, you cannot tell if who you are speaking to is really human or alien or mere simulacrum. How can you fight an enemy you cannot even prove is real? Paranoia will destroy ya but that doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
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I have money (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I have money (Score:5, Funny)
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More like RAM than a hard drive then? (Score:5, Interesting)
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tag: paycheck (Score:3, Interesting)
I could have told them about this (Score:5, Funny)
Not sure what kind of research these scientists have been doing, but I routinely "jam the machine" with whiskey.
I tried, it. It works. (Score:5, Funny)
- Douglas Quaid.
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They actually discovered this years ago (Score:3, Funny)
Ive seen this its awesome (Score:2, Funny)
Its also perfect for erasing short term memories, and it also erases short term memories.
new-fangled inventions (Score:5, Funny)
So where was this... (Score:2, Funny)
So... (Score:5, Interesting)
I get the feeling that memory is a bit like a set of linked lists. If the head node in the list gets mislaid, then the memory might all still be there - but you can't get to it, at least not easily. I've noticed on many occasions I've tried to recall something - I know I know it, but I can't actually access the memory. Then several days later, the thing I was trying to recall will pop into my consciousness, a bit like a background "find / -name something" had been executing all along.
Funnily enough we were just discussing memory on IRC - how if we were playing a piece of classical music on the piano from memory, one bad note and all of a sudden you couldn't continue from where you were without going all the way back to the start, almost like losing the next node in the linked list.
If true, then cryonics are effectively useless. (Score:2, Interesting)
This science is a two edged sword. (Score:3, Interesting)
in rats...
....don't remember...
I've got a simpler experiment. Try using a little ethyl alcohol on a brain circuit (you know, the stuff in beer, whiskey, etc.?) and if you get enough in the right place, no long term memory is formed because the brain is asleep. So a person wouldn't develop an aversion to something that happened while they were blacked out in terms of memory but still conscious otherwise.
But governmental experimenters can't force you to drink to destabilizwe your memories, and because -- to my knowledge most of our useful memories are stored in multiple areas of the brain and integrated by consciousness -- I'm not sure that the availability of a drug that can chemically destabilize memory is a good thing.
Prosecutor: What did you see?
Witness: I
Get the picture?
Hello!! basic neuroanatomy 101: impulses are transmitted by electrochemical means and interpreted by electrochemical means, and presumably stored by changes brought about by electrochemical means. So if they flooded a little chunk of your brain with a neurococktail that fuzzed up the cellular chemistry that caused a change, it stands to reason that the change wouldn't remain stable.
Re:This science is a two edged sword. (Score:4, Interesting)
As a mentioned elsewhere, this finding probably won't help much therapeutically, as it is too far-reaching. What's really needed for treatment of memory-based pathologies is something that erases a memory (or prevents a memory from being restored) when it is accessed so that you can target specific memories, and there's evidence that it might be feasible.
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Juggling (Score:5, Insightful)
So your memories are a function of how many molecules you can juggle. But you are more than your memories. Even if I couldn't remember things that happened to me beyond a day ago, I would still have opinions and feelings about situations that occur each day. I wouldn't have specific memories to tie to current events, but I would still avoid some situations and be drawn to others.
Which leads me to wonder, where that "you" is stored and if that storage is "permanent" or easily disrupted. Is my knowledge of mathematics a "memory"? What about my general disposition? Can someone make me drop the "Don't murder people" ball and disrupt my a moral imperatives? That one happens pretty often, actually.
There's no permanence. Just an ever-changing approximation of whatever you envision yourself to be.On the plus side... (Score:2, Funny)
Couple of Health thoughts from article (Score:3, Insightful)
If memory is (as the article says):
In other words, long-term memory is not a one-time inscription on the nerve network, but an ongoing process which the brain must continuously fuel and maintain
Crazy idea, the memories I've trusted as being relatively permanent are actually only a few weeks old, or months, but much younger then the experiences they describe -at a molecular level. It's clear that we have limited conscious control over them, bad memories affect people in a number of documented ways. However ignoring the content the memories are just molecules that we can monkey with. My question is: How many other parts or functions in our body are not permanent but maintained with similar molecular functions - scar tissue? Health issues? Just as the body maintains memories, good or bad, does it maintain other things good or bad? Can the body forget to be sick? forget to be Crazy? Could we 'forget' cancer - (molecularly give the cues for the cells not to reproduce or be maintained) -and I know "cure for cancer" is crazy talk - however I love the idea of hacking the molecular mechanisms of the body in a way more clever then massive powersurges of cell destroying drugs and radiation.
One way memory gets erased is by taking oath (Score:2, Funny)
Rat-brained assumptions (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sure they thought of this (Score:3, Interesting)
To test whether the memory needs regular update (their "little machine" metaphor), they need to show that their protein doesn't harm existing memories, which is the opposite of what their experiment showed.
What am I missing (besides the years 1981-2)?
Where do I sign up? (Score:5, Funny)
*shivers*
Wow, Star Wars fans will be lining up (Score:4, Funny)
Made mandatory by the *IAA ! (Score:4, Funny)
DRAM (Score:3, Insightful)
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Chilled Brains Retain Memory - Mod Parent Up (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that human brains chilled to inactivity maintain their memory, also hints that frozen brains may very well be recoverable in the future. It's said to be an old myth that freezing brains causes ice cr