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."
Are they sure the reason is so clearcut and simple?
We took the entire study group and displayed both Tubgirl and Goatse to them, this made them all extremely nervous. We then took one half of the group and after injecting them with a drug (not approved for humans yet) and once again shown them goatse.
The next day when we displayed goatse on the projector, only half the group were nervous.
Hypothosis 1: The drug made them forget. Hypothosis 2: The repeated viewings made them immune to the shock (O RLY?) Hypothosis 3: They were still drugged up from yesterday to care about the shock. Hypothosis 4: The drug gave them super powers. Electricity makes them stronger.
I, for one, hail our super electricity feeding super rat overlords.
This opens up some possibilities for treatment of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Drugging all troops before combat will be much less expensive than paying for PTSD treatment. What a Brave New World this opens up.
But on the bright side once you're caught wandering aimlessly around the battlefield having forgotten all your basic training when they capture you you can just take a drug which wipes all knowledge of any sensitive information they may otherwise torture you to obtain.
Less expensive, sure; but you say that like PTSD is something that throwing money at solves perfectly. To play the Devil's Advocate for a moment, consider that in many cases Post Traumatic Stress Disorder has such an effect that it's impossible to fully recover and lead a normal life- whereas treating the patient so he or she does not remember the trauma may in fact be the only cure. That it frees the VA's (as recent events seem to reiterate) limited budget to focus on those with more immediately life-threa
This opens up some possibilities for treatment of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Drugging all troops before combat will be much less expensive than paying for war crimes trials and prison sentences.
Fixed.
A very handy use I would think. "Yes your honour I apparently was ordered to construct 200 hundred death camps and eliminate 30% of the population but I have no recollection of who gave that order."
"Your honour, it appears that records were kept detailing the implementation of the death camps and the specific instructions and conversations between all parties. However unfortunately these documents were DRM protected and have been irretrievably lost when the system detected a surrender situation had occured.
Soon the RIAA will realize that it can prevent you from illegally storing music in your memory. How long before they start distributing memory pills to take after each song you listen to?
Your Honor, the prosecution keeps saying I killed this man for money but I have no recollection of this nor any recollection of agreeing
to do this so I can not possibly plead guilty which is my legal right. Thus I can't get a fair trial. I move to dismiss. --
Innocent power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html [blogspot.com]
This opens up some possibilities for treatment of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Drugging all troops before combat will be much less expensive than paying for PTSD treatment.
"But even as far back as that [20th Century Marine Captain] costume, we had begun to make rapid progress."
"Oh? Shall we review your `rapid progress'?"
[Q changes to the uniform of a military officer from the mid-21st Century wars and speaks with a drugged voice.]
"Rapid progress to where humans learned to control their military wi
Drugging all troops before combat.... What a Brave New World this opens up.
Sounds more like Dune's Sardaukar troops (I vaguely recall the books referring to their drugged state(s) even though wikipedia neglects to mention anything about this)
Actually, a drug that could erase memories might be a very good thing for people who undergo traumatic surgeries. I spent a good portion of my life with untreated PTSD because doctors used to believe that children who had surgeries didn't remember the experience. Well, they recently found out that assumption was wrong.
I, personally, would have preferred to "forget" the experience of undergoing three open-heart surgeries rather than being angry at everything when I was between the ages of 4 and 34.
I was thinking more along the lines of the chemical equivalent of modern marketing, forget how bad our (P)OS was this time, the next one will be perfect and contain all these new you beaut features, we promise;).
Perhaps they can even include in print magazines, instead of scratch and sniff you could have scratch and taste, for the selective removal of all those previous bad product experiences and as a bonus the complete erasure of any knowledge relating to any competitors.
The objective results are pretty inarguable, but the implication that the reason that the rats didn't fear the note they heard while drugged is that they had completely forgotten about it seems tenuous. The rats could just as easily become accustomed to the note, develop a different association with that note (like being drugged), or become unafraid of it for some other related reason.
The article supports the claim by saying the brain activity is different, but it seems that more complicated experiments would need to be done before it could really be claimed that memories could be wiped this way.
the rats didn't fear the note they heard while drugged
The rats didn't hear anything while drugged. The experiment goes
The rats hear tone 1 and suffer pain.
The rats are (or are not) given a drug.
Time passes...
The rats hear tone 2 and suffer pain.
The rats that are drugged then have no association of pain with the FIRST tone. So even if you think the drug was around to affect them for the second tone, that's not the tone that's "forgotten" -- both sets of rats have fears with the second tone.
The whole point is that the drug removes the association wi
A drug that selectively erases memories would be very oopen to misuse. I believe we should immediately institute proper measures to prevent our police, governments, and military forces from..
..what's that? A glass of orange juice? My favorite! Thank you, that's very kind.
First, according to article, the rats were first "trained" to fear both tones. Thus, you don't have to administer the drug before the stimulus has been conditioned to produce a fear response and you don't have to administer the drug during the fear conditioning. Therefore, this is not a proactive treatment, but a retroactive one. You would not use this drug to train a ruthless, emotionless army. The article says nothing about the drug preventing or blocking the future association of neutral stimuli with
PTSD is somewhat more complex than just Pavlovian knee-jerk responses to certain stimuli. Judging by the hormones produced, for example, it seems that PTSD is basically being stuck in trying to learn how one should have dealt with an extreme situation where there was really no sane way of dealing with it. The re-living it over and over again is basically just a (screwed up) way of trying to learn how that could have been avoided, except there is nothing to learn, so it never stops. At any rate, those noises
I remember, or perhaps I don't, hmmm, a post sometime back, I think, that a/. poster mentioned something about, "And the RIAA now charges per memory of a song, as it is only licensed to be heard once. Soon, memory altering methods will be used to erase the song from persons memory who do not continue to pay the licensing fees."
But then I could be wrong.
Oh, come one! You knew someone was going to make the RIAA connection!
Sounds like an old Orson Scott Card story - scientist testing a drug on rats finds
it wipes memory. Using that they determine how memory is stored and manage to
record it. Now they can upload a rat mind into a different rat. Hey, let's see
if that works for people! A little bit later cloning becomes easy, and now it's
a torture tool - if we record his memory while we kill him and then upload into
a new body, did he really die?
...soudns more like they are preventing or reversing only recently formed memories. If you taught them two things on that day - fear the first tone but the buzz noise gives you pleasure, then after being drugged, they would lose both memories i.e. all new things learnt on that day would be erased.
OK, now to go and read the article to see if they tested for this...:-)
Mind you, the drug is called "booze" and you don't do the selecting, it does. It tends to erase things like why it was a good idea to leave the bar with that hyena-creature, or why you were dancing with it in the first place.
... to the age-old question: "What would a movie that combined 'The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' and 'Ben' be like?"
Or perhaps it's "The Secret of Nim" meets "Fifty First Dates".
Or even "Flowers for Algernon" crossed with "Memento".
I, for one, welcome our new amnesiac rodent overlords.
Are they sure? (Score:5, Funny)
We took the entire study group and displayed both Tubgirl and Goatse to them, this made them all extremely nervous.
We then took one half of the group and after injecting them with a drug (not approved for humans yet) and once again shown them goatse.
The next day when we displayed goatse on the projector, only half the group were nervous.
Hypothosis 1: The drug made them forget.
Hypothosis 2: The repeated viewings made them immune to the shock (O RLY?)
Hypothosis 3: They were still drugged up from yesterday to care about the shock.
Hypothosis 4: The drug gave them super powers. Electricity makes them stronger.
I, for one, hail our super electricity feeding super rat overlords.
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The control group helps eliminate hypotheses (Score:3, Insightful)
Only for those with the drug. And, tellingly, they were immune to the first tone and not the second (repeated, but different) tone.
They still responded to the second tone (post-drug) that was paired with the shock.
Very limited super powers, as they still responded to
Drugs. Schmugs. (Score:2)
obligatory (Score:2)
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Ya, just don't ask them what happened.
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Re:obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
So give it to them after combat, or they'll be even more stressed out...
"I remember I kept all of a sudden being in combat, and have no idea how I got there or why. Those were the worst years of my life."
Parent
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"Yes your honour I apparently was ordered to construct 200 hundred death camps and eliminate 30% of the population but I have no recollection of who gave that order."
"Your honour, it appears that records were kept detailing the implementation of the death camps and the specific instructions and conversations between all parties. However unfortunately these documents were DRM protected and have been irretrievably lost when the system detected a surrender situation had occured.
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Soon the RIAA will realize that it can prevent you from illegally storing music in your memory. How long before they start distributing memory pills to take after each song you listen to?
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Defence for hit men? (Score:2)
--
Innocent power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
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"But even as far back as that [20th Century Marine Captain] costume, we had begun to make rapid progress."
"Oh? Shall we review your `rapid progress'?"
[Q changes to the uniform of a military officer from the mid-21st Century wars and speaks with a drugged voice.]
"Rapid progress to where humans learned to control their military wi
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I, personally, would have preferred to "forget" the experience of undergoing three open-heart surgeries rather than being angry at everything when I was between the ages of 4 and 34.
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Perhaps they can even include in print magazines, instead of scratch and sniff you could have scratch and taste, for the selective removal of all those previous bad product experiences and as a bonus the complete erasure of any knowledge relating to any competitors.
It's new! (Score:2)
Reverse Engineering (Score:1)
did it really "erase" memory? (Score:5, Insightful)
The article supports the claim by saying the brain activity is different, but it seems that more complicated experiments would need to be done before it could really be claimed that memories could be wiped this way.
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the rats didn't fear the note they heard while drugged
The rats didn't hear anything while drugged. The experiment goes
The rats that are drugged then have no association of pain with the FIRST tone. So even if you think the drug was around to affect them for the second tone, that's not the tone that's "forgotten" -- both sets of rats have fears with the second tone.
The whole point is that the drug removes the association wi
Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)
..what's that? A glass of orange juice? My favorite! Thank you, that's very kind.
Now then.. *gulp*
I've been doing this for years... (Score:1)
Observations (Score:2, Insightful)
First, according to article, the rats were first "trained" to fear both tones. Thus, you don't have to administer the drug before the stimulus has been conditioned to produce a fear response and you don't have to administer the drug during the fear conditioning. Therefore, this is not a proactive treatment, but a retroactive one. You would not use this drug to train a ruthless, emotionless army. The article says nothing about the drug preventing or blocking the future association of neutral stimuli with
And who knows how selective this is? (Score:2)
PTSD is more complex (Score:2)
At any rate, those noises
And let's not forget the RIAA... (Score:1)
But then I could be wrong.
Oh, come one! You knew someone was going to make the RIAA connection!
Later.
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Day 1:
Day 2:
Day 3:
Deja vu (Score:2, Interesting)
Not specific memories (Score:2)
OK, now to go and read the article to see if they tested for this...
Finally... (Score:1)
Mind you (Score:2)
I am a test subject (Score:2)
This has been around for years... (Score:2)
This applies to the majority of both my degrees
:-]
Jaj
I am a test subject (Score:4, Funny)
The drug did not erase a memory (Score:3, Interesting)
I am a test subject (Score:2)
Finally, an answer is in reach... (Score:2, Funny)
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Dagger of the Mind (Score:2)
Pair it up with "Minority Report" tech for some real fun: Preemptive Erasing.
HA! (Score:1)
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Damn! (Score:2)
old news (Score:2)
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