The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever

Technology is amazing.  But I'm not sure this could be a good thing in the long run. Anesthetizing our painful memories? Really? Sounds good at first blush but I'm not so sure. He is the conclusion to a truly fascinating (and troubling?) article:

Being able to control memory doesn’t simply give us admin access to our brains. It gives us the power to shape nearly every aspect of our lives. There’s something terrifying about this. Long ago, humans accepted the uncontrollable nature of memory; we can’t choose what to remember or forget. But now it appears that we’ll soon gain the ability to alter our sense of the past.

The problem with eliminating pain, of course, is that pain is often educational. We learn from our regrets and mistakes; wisdom is not free. If our past becomes a playlist—a collection of tracks we can edit with ease—then how will we resist the temptation to erase the unpleasant ones? Even more troubling, it’s easy to imagine a world where people don’t get to decide the fate of their own memories. “My worst nightmare is that some evil dictator gets ahold of this,” Sacktor says. “There are all sorts of dystopian things one could do with these drugs.” While tyrants have often rewritten history books, modern science might one day allow them to rewrite us, wiping away genocides and atrocities with a cocktail of pills.

Those scenarios aside, the fact is we already tweak our memories—we just do it badly. Reconsolidation constantly alters our recollections, as we rehearse nostalgias and suppress pain. We repeat stories until they’re stale, rewrite history in favor of the winners, and tamp down our sorrows with whiskey. “Once people realize how memory actually works, a lot of these beliefs that memory shouldn’t be changed will seem a little ridiculous,” Nader says. “Anything can change memory. This technology isn’t new. It’s just a better version of an existing biological process.”

It’s a pretty notion—hey, this memory-alteration stuff is totally natural, man—but some ethicists and clinicians dispute whether this kind of therapy is acceptable. Researchers in the field counter that not treating suffering is cruel, regardless of the type of pain involved. We have a duty, they say, to take psychological pain seriously. We can no longer ignore people like Lois. “If you’re in a car accident and you break your leg, everyone agrees we need to give you treatment and painkillers,” Nader says. “But if something terrible happens and your mind breaks, people conclude that treatment is a dangerous idea, at least if it’s effective. But what’s the difference?” Just think of all the poor souls in therapy, trying to talk themselves into a better place. These scientists point out that memory tweaks will one day be used in the same way—except that unlike CISD or Jungian analysis or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, these therapies could put permanent recovery just one pill away.

At the moment, of course, such treatments remain entirely hypothetical, an avant-garde limited to the lab. PKMzeta inhibitors can zap rodent memories, but we can’t ask the rats how they feel afterward. Maybe they feel terrible. Maybe they miss their fear. Maybe they miss their morphine. Or maybe all they know is that they miss something. They just can’t remember what.

Read the rest.