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Post by Deleted on Oct 12, 2011 9:51:30 GMT -6
From the NY Times: Read More: www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/nyregion/08about.html?ref=memoryMemories: Good, Bad and Erasable By JIM DWYER Published: April 8, 2009 Word came this week that scientists at a laboratory in Brooklyn have found a chemical that can erase memories in rats. One day, we nonrats might be able to edit what we remember by taking a drug. The mind hardly knows where to begin boggling at such a prospect. Related Brain Power: Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory (April 6, 2009) Times Topics: Jim Dwyer This advance, said the lead researcher on the discovery, Todd C. Sacktor, a neuroscientist at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, raises the possibility of a drug that “gives you control over your own thoughts.” “You would have more efficient control of your own memories.” Memory, you will remember, is already subject to regular editing: the stories we tell ourselves and others are revised whenever they’re pulled out of storage. New coats of varnish are laid on. Imaging technology makes it possible to watch the brain firing as it summons a memory, and it shows that a single story — the joke told last Thanksgiving, an old friend’s rattling car, a quarrel between lovers — is chopped into pieces, stored in different areas of the brain and then reassembled, with new or different elements that have been added since the original event.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 12, 2011 10:04:53 GMT -6
I can also see another dark side of this discovery. A serial rapist could use this to make his victims forget he ever touched them... not necessarily a GOOD thing...
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Post by paulette on Oct 12, 2011 10:06:32 GMT -6
this was originally suggested to be used on trauma victims so that they wouldn't have to remember the gruesome details.
It terrifies me. For the same reason that others have here - the power of wiping a memory is a serious boundary breach! I can see the possibility of say, a terribly burned child, having his or her exact memories removed. But I can also see the incredible potential for abuse! Rob someone (or worse), slip them some black market memory be gone - no witness. Bothered by those annoying witnesses to your crime who are going to testify - no need to kill them just wipe them. And they won't remember that they don't remember. This is Orwellian at its finest.
And there was a movie about this - two people meet on a bus and are strangely attracted. It turns out that they were lovers and didn't want the pain of loss and so both wiped the other's memories from their heads (voluntarily). I guess its nothing you can change your mind about later...
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Post by skywalker on Oct 13, 2011 18:45:14 GMT -6
And let's not forget about what would happen when the government gets there fiendish hands on that type of power. Somebody votes the wrong way in an election...just erase their memories and reprogram them to support the party line. Or better yet, just erase the memories of everybody who remembers what freedom, liberty and constitutional rights are and "reeducate" them all to be good little socialist slaves. The potential abuse with something like this is staggering. This is the type of thing that needs to be stopped now rather than after it is too late.
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