Imagine you’re the manager of a café. It stays open late and the neighbourhood has gone quiet by the time you lock the doors. You put the evening’s earnings into a bank bag, tuck that into your backpack, and head home. It’s a short walk through a poorly lit park. And there, next to the pond, you realise you’ve been hearing footsteps behind you. Before you can turn around, a man sprints up and stabs you in the stomach. When you fall to the ground, he kicks you, grabs your backpack, and runs off. Fortunately a bystander calls an ambulance which takes you, bleeding and shaken, to the nearest hospital.
The emergency room physician stitches you up and tells you that, aside from the pain and a bit of blood loss, you’re in good shape. Then she sits down and looks you in the eye. She tells you that people who live through a traumatic event like yours often develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The condition can be debilitating, resulting in flashbacks that prompt you to relive the trauma over and over. It can cause irritation, anxiety, angry outbursts and a magnified fear response. But she has a pill you can take right now that will decrease your recall of the night’s events – and thus the fear and other emotions associated with it – and guard against the potential effects of PTSD without completely erasing the memory itself.
Would you like to try it?
When Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, asked nearly 1,000 people a similar question, more than 80 per cent said: ‘No.’ They would rather retain all memory and emotion of that day, even if it came with a price. More striking was the fact that 46 per cent of them didn’t believe people should be allowed to have such a choice in the first place.
Every day, science is ushering us closer to the kind of memory erasure that, until recently, was more the province of Philip K Dick. Studies now show that some medications, including a blood-pressure drug called propranolol, might have the ability to do just what the ER doctor described – not just for new traumas, but past ones too.
Granted, that future is not yet here. Most of the time, we’re still better at subconsciously editing our own recollections than any new technology is. But with researchers working on techniques that can chisel, reconstruct and purge life’s memories, it becomes crucial to ask: do we need our real memories? What makes us believe that memory is so sacrosanct? And do memories really make us who we are?
Many would argue that humans are driven by their stories. We create our own narratives based on the memories we retain and those we choose to discard. We use memories to build an understanding of self. We lean on them to make decisions and direct our lives.
But what happens to our sense of self if we purge the most distasteful memories and cherry-pick the good ones? When some things are hard to think about, or so injurious to our self-image, are we better off creating a history in which they no longer exist? And if we do, are we doomed to repeat our mistakes without learning from them, doomed to fight the same wars? By finding ways to erase our memories, are we erasing ourselves? (...)
For decades, most memory researchers compared memories to photographs, and our brains to albums or filing cabinets stuffed full of them. They believed that each photo required an initial development period – much the way that pictures are processed in a darkroom – and then was filed away for future reference.
But in the past few decades, scientists have discovered that memory is far more plastic than that. It doesn’t just fade like a photograph tucked away in an album. The details subtly morph and shift. It’s malleable. And some research suggests it might be erasable.
Individual neurons communicate using chemicals called neurotransmitters, which flow from one neuron to the next across synapses – small gaps between the nerve cells. When memories are formed, protein changes at the nerve synapses must be consolidated and translated into long-term circuits in the brain. If consolidation is interrupted, the memory dissolves.
Different types of memories are stored in different places in the brain, and each memory has a dedicated network of neurons. Short-term memories such as a grocery list or an address live, briefly, in the pre-frontal cortex – the foremost area of the folded grey matter that encases the brain. Fear and other intensely emotional memories exist in the amygdala, while facts and autobiographical events are located in the hippocampus. But memories aren’t isolated in these different areas – they overlap and intertwine and connect and diverge like the tangled branches of an old lilac tree. Even when a factual memory fades it can leave an emotional trace behind, much the way that the lilac flower still knows how to open once it’s been snipped from the tree. Much the way the flower’s scent instantly transports you to a particular place and time, even if you can’t remember what you were doing or why you were there.
by Lauren Gravitz, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Simon Pemberton/Heart Agency
The emergency room physician stitches you up and tells you that, aside from the pain and a bit of blood loss, you’re in good shape. Then she sits down and looks you in the eye. She tells you that people who live through a traumatic event like yours often develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The condition can be debilitating, resulting in flashbacks that prompt you to relive the trauma over and over. It can cause irritation, anxiety, angry outbursts and a magnified fear response. But she has a pill you can take right now that will decrease your recall of the night’s events – and thus the fear and other emotions associated with it – and guard against the potential effects of PTSD without completely erasing the memory itself.
Would you like to try it?
When Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, asked nearly 1,000 people a similar question, more than 80 per cent said: ‘No.’ They would rather retain all memory and emotion of that day, even if it came with a price. More striking was the fact that 46 per cent of them didn’t believe people should be allowed to have such a choice in the first place.
Every day, science is ushering us closer to the kind of memory erasure that, until recently, was more the province of Philip K Dick. Studies now show that some medications, including a blood-pressure drug called propranolol, might have the ability to do just what the ER doctor described – not just for new traumas, but past ones too.Granted, that future is not yet here. Most of the time, we’re still better at subconsciously editing our own recollections than any new technology is. But with researchers working on techniques that can chisel, reconstruct and purge life’s memories, it becomes crucial to ask: do we need our real memories? What makes us believe that memory is so sacrosanct? And do memories really make us who we are?
Many would argue that humans are driven by their stories. We create our own narratives based on the memories we retain and those we choose to discard. We use memories to build an understanding of self. We lean on them to make decisions and direct our lives.
But what happens to our sense of self if we purge the most distasteful memories and cherry-pick the good ones? When some things are hard to think about, or so injurious to our self-image, are we better off creating a history in which they no longer exist? And if we do, are we doomed to repeat our mistakes without learning from them, doomed to fight the same wars? By finding ways to erase our memories, are we erasing ourselves? (...)
For decades, most memory researchers compared memories to photographs, and our brains to albums or filing cabinets stuffed full of them. They believed that each photo required an initial development period – much the way that pictures are processed in a darkroom – and then was filed away for future reference.
But in the past few decades, scientists have discovered that memory is far more plastic than that. It doesn’t just fade like a photograph tucked away in an album. The details subtly morph and shift. It’s malleable. And some research suggests it might be erasable.
Individual neurons communicate using chemicals called neurotransmitters, which flow from one neuron to the next across synapses – small gaps between the nerve cells. When memories are formed, protein changes at the nerve synapses must be consolidated and translated into long-term circuits in the brain. If consolidation is interrupted, the memory dissolves.
Different types of memories are stored in different places in the brain, and each memory has a dedicated network of neurons. Short-term memories such as a grocery list or an address live, briefly, in the pre-frontal cortex – the foremost area of the folded grey matter that encases the brain. Fear and other intensely emotional memories exist in the amygdala, while facts and autobiographical events are located in the hippocampus. But memories aren’t isolated in these different areas – they overlap and intertwine and connect and diverge like the tangled branches of an old lilac tree. Even when a factual memory fades it can leave an emotional trace behind, much the way that the lilac flower still knows how to open once it’s been snipped from the tree. Much the way the flower’s scent instantly transports you to a particular place and time, even if you can’t remember what you were doing or why you were there.
by Lauren Gravitz, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Simon Pemberton/Heart Agency
