Tired of remembering your ex-spouse? Have a trauma in your past that you'd rather not recall? Well, researchers are actually working on erasing bad memories. And that should scare the bejabbers out of anyone who has read Phillip K. Dick's We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.
An amnesia drug that blocks or deletes bad memories is under development by researchers at Harvard and McGill University (in Montreal). The technique seems to allow psychiatrists to disrupt the biochemical pathways that allow a memory to be recalled. You don't even need to know the Vulcan mind-meld to do it.
In a new study, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, the drug propranolol is used along with therapy to "dampen" memories of trauma victims. They treated 19 accident or rape victims for ten days, during which the patients were asked to describe their memories of the traumatic event that had happened 10 years earlier. Some patients were given the drug, while others were given a placebo.
A week later, they found that patients given the drug showed fewer signs of stress when recalling their trauma.
Similar research led by Professor Joseph LeDoux has been carried out at New York University on rats; scientists were able to remove a specific memory from the brains of rats while leaving the rest of the animals' memories intact. An amnesia drug called U0126 was administered.
The rats were trained to associate two musical tones with a mild electrical shock so that when they heard either of the tones they would brace themselves for a shock.
The researchers then gave half the rats the drug when playing one of the musical tones.
After the treatment, the rats that had been given the drug no longer associated that particular tone with an imminent shock but still braced themselves upon hearing the second tone, demonstrating only one memory had been deleted.
The linked article at Technovelgy has a bunch of references to science fiction movies, television shows and stories that predicted memory erasure. Including the story mentioned above.
