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Biotech Science

Drug Selectively Removes Rats' Memory 64

Posted by Hemos from the there-is-nothing-to-see-here dept.
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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Drug Selectively Removes Rats' Memory More

Drug Selectively Removes Rats' Memory

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  • Are they sure? (Score:5, Funny)

    by LiquidCoooled ( 634315 ) on Monday March 12, 2007 @08:55AM (#18315751) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 ) *

      Hypothosis 4: The drug gave them super powers. Electricity makes them stronger
      Super RAT powers? Will 'apt-get squeal' draw a GIANT ASCII PICTURE of a SUPER RAT? I'm scared. Really scared.

    • Hypothesis 2: The repeated viewings made them immune to the shock (O RLY?)

      Only for those with the drug. And, tellingly, they were immune to the first tone and not the second (repeated, but different) tone.

      Hypothesis 3: They were still drugged up from yesterday to care about the shock.

      They still responded to the second tone (post-drug) that was paired with the shock.

      Hypothesis 4: The drug gave them super powers. Electricity makes them stronger.

      Very limited super powers, as they still responded to

    • There's already a drug fer dat. It's called, uh, "concrete boots". Yeah. Dat's de ticket. Concrete boots. F'getabout it. -- Vinny

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bucktug ( 306690 )

      Hypothosis 4: The drug gave them super powers. Electricity makes them stronger.

      Save the Ratbert, Save the world!
  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by mastershake_phd ( 1050150 )
      Drugging all troops before combat will be much less expensive than paying for PTSD treatment.

      Ya, just don't ask them what happened.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Sobrique ( 543255 )
        It'd make war crime tribunals a whole lot easier to deal with.
        • Bah. You could just refuse to accept the jurisdiction of war crimes courts while demanding other nations submit to them. Oh, wait, already been done.

    • Re:obligatory (Score:5, Funny)

      by jimstapleton ( 999106 ) on Monday March 12, 2007 @09:05AM (#18315901) Journal
      actually, it looks like the drug is administrated /after/ the fact.

      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."
      • 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.
        • And here you have it - the future of DRM.

          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]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HTH NE1 ( 675604 )
      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

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )

      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)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thewiz ( 24994 ) *
      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.
    • A military that does not learn from combat will not survive for very long.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )
      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 scientists have concluded that this new drug, tentatively named Rohypnol, shows great promise for "all kinds of treatments".

  • did it really "erase" memory? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xappax ( 876447 ) on Monday March 12, 2007 @09:04AM (#18315893)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by JRaven ( 720 )

      the rats didn't fear the note they heard while drugged

      The rats didn't hear anything while drugged. The experiment goes

      1. The rats hear tone 1 and suffer pain.
      2. The rats are (or are not) given a drug.
      3. Time passes...
      4. 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

  • Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rob T Firefly ( 844560 ) on Monday March 12, 2007 @09:10AM (#18315977) Homepage Journal
    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.

    Now then.. *gulp* ....what was I saying?
    • "Drug" is defined by the FDA as "any substance advertised to cure a disease."

      Don't you think it's about time they were returned to a more productive task than the one they are experimenting on now, and especially to not be so cruel to the little creatures? Men are much more reasonable test tubjects than are animals, that's why a Veterinarian trains for twice the length of time at a university because animals require better interpretation on their symptoms while men can talk about the pain all they want.

      Thi
  • It's called vodka.

  • Observations (Score:2, Insightful)

    by KenshoDude ( 1001993 )

    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

    • If the "drug not available to humans" erased ALL memories prior to its use, the rats might also still have the same results regarding the two tones.
    • 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!

    Later.
    • You think the RIAA will want you to forget the song? They're much more cunning, devious, and greedy than that...

      Day 1:
      1. RIAA: "You downloaded this song, and have kept it for 1 day. That'll be $0.99, please".
      2. You: (Looks at timestamp on file) "Uh, OK" (Hands over money, takes a swig of refreshing 'Memorade')

      Day 2:

      1. RIAA: "You downloaded this song, and have kept it for 2 days. That'll be $1.98, please".
      2. You: (Looks at timestamp on file) "Uh, OK" (Hands over money, takes a swig of refreshing 'Memorade')

      Day 3:

  • Deja vu (Score:2, Interesting)

    by iamspews ( 714559 )
    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... :-)

  • A cure for the goatese problem...
  • 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.
  • Actually, this pill isn't just used for rats. I am also participating in a test of this drug. In fact, I am about to take my next dose soon.
  • See this link [wikipedia.org] I've experienced this MANY times before

    This applies to the majority of both my degrees

    :-]

    Jaj

  • I am a test subject (Score:4, Funny)

    by MyLongNickName ( 822545 ) on Monday March 12, 2007 @10:48AM (#18317307) Journal
    Actually, this pill isn't just used for rats. I am also participating in a test of this drug. In fact, I am about to take my next dose soon!

  • The drug did not erase a memory (Score:3, Interesting)

    by xutopia ( 469129 ) on Monday March 12, 2007 @10:50AM (#18317327) Homepage
    It simply stopped it from going into long term memory.
  • Actually, this pill isn't just used for rats. I'm also participating in a test of this drug. In fact, I am about to take my next dose soon.
  • ... 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nasch ( 598556 )

      "The Secret of Nim"
      That's NIMH, as in the National Institute of Mental Health. This pedantry has been brought to you by nasch.
  • How soon will Star Trek's "Dagger of the Mind" become a reality.

    Pair it up with "Minority Report" tech for some real fun: Preemptive Erasing.
  • Take that Pinky and the Brain!
    • Why do you think Pinky can never remember what they do every night, even though it's always the same thing?
  • ...for this new drug to be called "Gleemonex". And it should be orange in colour, nevermind the fact that it's actually pale blue in it's native synthesized form :P

    Go watch "Brain Candy", it'll be good for you :)
  • I read this story earlier and had a very insightful comment thought up I was going to post, but now I can't seem to remember it...
  • I selectively forget how many beers I have had after 3, or 4, or is it 5? Well, I think I'll have another beer....

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