I remember when memories lasted a lifetime…

Whenever memory comes up in biotech, it almost always deals with improvement.  How can we enhance our memories?  Take this supplement and your memory will improve.  Eat enough fish so you can learn more.  Recently, however, some research has been directed toward erasing memories rather than helping them form.

            Like every process in the brain, memories are a product of connections between cells.  Memories are stored in networks of cells, and each cell's activation launches a cascade of responses in surrounding cells.  In the late 1990s, Karim Nader, a neuroscientist at New York University, set out to research how to inhibit memories.  He trained lab rats to associate a certain sound with a painful shock.  After training, he played the sound and injected their brains with chemicals that inhibit protein synthesis.  Protein synthesis is required for memories to form, but to Nader’s surprise, the treatment permanently erased the rat’s already formed memory of the sound.   The experiment went against a common belief in neuroscience: memories, once formed, are simply maintained in the same place in the brain.  Instead, he discovered, “they are formed and then rebuilt every time they’re accessed … recalling a memory is nearly identical to the initial creation of a long-term recollection.”  As a result, treatment to prevent protein synthesis while recalling a certain memory prevents the memory from reforming in the brain.

            So it works in rats, but what about humans?  This research suggests that with proper treatment, we could potentially erase specific memories.  A person would have to focus on the event that they wish to forget.  Once they are certain they have a grasp of it, they would take a protein-synthesis blocker and attempt to recall the memory again.  Because recalling a memory requires rebuilding it, the drug would block the process and the memory would never be reformed. 

            So the treatment is scientifically feasible, but should it ever be used?  It’s a tricky issue.  On one hand, some people suffer from memory related diseases such as PTSD.  Although PTSD is a result of stress, it is really related to the memory of a stressful event.  Similarly, victims of assault or abuse are often haunted by the memory of past events.  What if they could forget their troublesome memories?  I believe that such treatment would be justified in such cases.  It would allow people who are haunted by specific memories to function again.

 Drawing the line for what exactly qualifies for forgetting, however, is nearly impossible.  We already administer antidepressants to the chronically depressed, how is erasing a single haunting memory any different? If such a drug were readily accessible, however, it would be only a matter of time before people went from erasing memories of abuse and events that affect them daily to erasing far more insignificant events: an awkward encounter, a job interview gone wrong, or even just a bad day.

My concern is if such treatment became common practice.  The implications of widespread memory erasure are intriguing, and perhaps too broad for a single post, but on the whole, I have to say I disagree with the idea.  Entire events could be forgotten outside of direct documentation.  What if Americans took such drugs en masse after 9/11 and forgot the events of the day?  Documentation of it would obviously still exist, but there would be a clear difference in the national memory of the event versus without such drugs.  Ultimately, each person and society is defined by abilities and memories.  In my view, erasing memories haphazardly amounts to completely changing a person and, along with it, society.


http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/all/1
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-07/uoia-nps072607.php