Scientists Erase Specific Memories in Mice – Yahoo! News
“While memories are great teachers and obviously crucial for survival and adaptation, selectively removing incapacitating memories, such as traumatic war memories or an unwanted fear, could help many people live better lives,” Tsien said.
The “work reveals a molecular mechanism of how [memory deletion] can be done quickly and without doing damage to brain cells.”
I’ve already spoken about this line of research before (and at greater length in “No more painful memories?”), and am still extremely uncomfortable with it. The possibility that you can send people to war, or torture detainees, then erase their memories of it just make my skin crawl. This is exactly the sort of technology secret services would want to get their hands on, and there’s no reason to think there’d be any qualms against using it.
What are your thoughts?
excellent. pursue to all ends. the more memory we can get rid of the better. the more history we need not know the better. if we can just forget that we ever became self-conscious…aww…if we could. keep up the work boys and girls, and everything inbetween.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. Look up the alternate ending script on the net. Is good.
What’s that song? I drink to get drunk, don’t ask me why I smoke.
Personally, I like the idea of considering a world with selective memories. Do you think reputation would be less important (since the person might have done something that has been erased), therefore trust would become more important, that you haven’t erased the other person’s memory after doing something horrible to them.
What chu guys think?
I think I’ve heard the alternative ending, but will check it out.
I think we already live in a world with selective memories – look at national mythologies; school history books.
Old cliché of ignoring the past and being doomed to repeat it. Soldiers are scarred terribly by the horrific things they’ve seen and done. Would the world be better off if there was no one who could attest to how abhorrent war was?