Imagine there was a way for you to forget certain things or experiences at will. Anything from a terrible traumatic experience to the memory of an unfulfilled romance – if you could, would you erase your memories? In the future this hypothetical dilemma will be part of our lives, as memory manipulation will become a real practical option.
The movie that predicted the future
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a sci-fi movie from 2004 staring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. It told the story of a guy who tries to erase the memory of his ex-girlfriend from his mind by using a futuristic memory erasing service. The Movie had a huge impact - not only did it win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, it also developed a cult following in the years following its release and is now regarded by many critics, including the New York Times and the BBC, as one of the greatest films of the 21st century.
While at the time of the movie's release, the memory-erasing idea was a completely made-up work of fiction, Today it seems like this movie may have predicted the future, as scientists are closer than ever to creating a method that could actually manipulate and erase human memories.
The complexity of memory
While there is a common belief that our memories are well organized in our brain like in a data-base and we can access them in a similar way to how we access files in computer folders, in realty it's much more complex than that. Every single memory we have is locked up in many connections between different neurons all across the brain - including all sorts of different brain areas. For example: our memory from a trip that we went on yesterday is stored in the connection between area of the brain that responsible to our sensory perception, our cognitive perceptions, our emotions and more.
If this not enough, the fact is that memory is very dynamic. Whenever we try to recall something, we’re actually physically changing that memory in our mind. The more we reflect on old memories, the less accurate they become because they are rebuilt every single time we try to remember them.
The big discovery
In 1995 a groundbreaking research from the University of Arizona discovered a special protein called Arc, which seemingly plays an important role in plastic changes in neurons that is critical to memory consolidation. According to the research findings, when this protein was detained, new memories could not be created.
But the more interesting part of this discovery had to do with the existing memories. Given the fact that every time we reach a certain memory we extract it and store it again, if a protein-inhibitor is administered as you recalled a particular memory, the existing memory might actually be erased!
An experiment from 2008 successfully demonstrated the implementation of this discovery: the experiment included lab mice which were placed in a chamber that played a specific tone before administering an electric shock through the floor. The mice learned to associate the chamber and sound with an electric shock and would freeze up and show stress whenever the sound was played. But when the researchers placed the mice in a different chamber, played the tone, and administered a protein-inhibitor, the mice showed no fear in relation to the sound. Placed back in the old chamber, the mice showed the classic fear response.
The whole experiment demonstrated that researchers were able to selectively erase a part of the mice’s memories (the one associated with sound), while leaving the memory of the shocking chamber intact. Which means not only that a memory could be deleted - a specific part of the memory could be deleted while another part of it might still remain intact.
A new type of psychological treatment?
The memory erasing discovery had a tremendous impact, and researches started looking for ways to use this ability to help people with various mental issues - from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to different kinds of phobias.
In 2015, for example, researchers from the Netherlands demonstrated they could take away arachnophobes' fear of spiders by using a drug called propranolol while looking at a tarantula placed inside a glass jar. The results were quite remarkable - while the group given the placebo and those given propranolol without being exposed to a spider showed no change in their fear levels, arachnophobes who were shown the spider and given the drug were able to touch the tarantula within days.
It's important to note that while many believe that this memory erasing technique has the potential to become a very useful treatment, the reality might be even more complicated. There are many supportive evidence that shows that our body itself has the capability of storing memories. Moreover - subconscious memory still remains a scientific mystery that we have almost no knowledge about. If so, it's not clear how effective it is simply to erase memories from our brain – the memories can still remain in all sorts of other less familiar states.
So at this point it's unclear how deep and total these memory erases can go. Nevertheless – there is no doubt they work, at least on a certain level, and this could be enough to generate a huge impact.
The world of memory flexibility
There are endless implementations to memory erasing besides mental help. Take, for example, the world of entertainment: instead of constantly searching for new movies and new TV series, why not watch your favorite piece again and again and erase your last memory from it, so you can get excited as if it was your first viewing each time you watch? Believe it or not, last year Samsung presented an online hypnotic service that seemingly does exactly this.
Memory erasing in order to regain an initial experience can be used in other areas of our life as well. For example: if you ever wanted to feel "like a virgin - touched for the very first time", all you'd have to do is simply erase the memories of previous intercourse. In theory, this way could enable you to experience all sorts of everyday activities with the same excitement that little children do.
But above all, memory erasing could serve simply for designing who we are. After all, who we are is largely defined by the sum of our memories, so whoever could control his memories could have a huge control over his entire self. So for example, if we have a terrible job that we hate - we could simply remove all track of it from our memories and keep only the memories of the great experiences that we could gain with the money we've earned from it. If we have big fights in our relationship - we could simply forget them and remember only the good parts. Memory erasing could be a powerful tool for coloring our life in pink - which could be great, but could also be very problematic.
The dangers of lost memories
It's not hard to see why opening this memory control option stores potential for trouble. In a world where a memory erasing technology exists, what will prevent governments from using it in order to obtain better control of its citizens? Who knows - maybe it has already happened and we simply don't realize it because we all got our memories erased…
But even if we leave aside this paranoid totalitarian idea, memory erasing is still very problematic by essence. Memory is what defines us - it's who we are for better and for worse. The good memories as well as the less pleasant ones are eventually what evolves us as people, and manipulating our memory may lead to blurring who we are.
For these reasons, it seems safe to assume that in the future, memory erasing will be highly regulated if not legally forbidden. Well, at least we can hope that it is.
In conclusion
In our extensive journey towards complete control over every aspect of our life, memory erasing is an evidently expected step. It's very difficult to predict the impact of such a development, as we have never tried dealing with something so fundamental as our memories. While there may be some disastrous outcomes, the possibilities are mind-blowing. One thing is for sure – we will find out soon. Or maybe, we already did and forgot…