Poll of the Day > Is erasing a memory possible?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Imagine victims of some sort of trauma. Wouldnt the ability to erase that memory be beneficial?

Wouldnt it be a type of cure?

Does this exist?

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No, no, and no

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You mean forgetting?

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fairly certain it does exist, and in fact has been used as treatment in some pretty extreme cases because it is not so much erasing A memory as it is erasing ALL memories.

if i recall it was one of the uses of electro shock therapy


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Noop_Noop posted...

fairly certain it does exist, and in fact has been used as treatment in some pretty extreme cases because it is not so much erasing A memory as it is erasing ALL memories.

if i recall it was one of the uses of electro shock therapy

Electroshock therapy is NO JOKE.


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Human memory is fallible. You can create a memory, and you can take one away. However, taking away a trauma is risky. Like, what if the emotional scarring runs deep, but the memory is no more - what then? Does this person seek therapy to remember why they hurt?

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I mean, all you really need is a brick.

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Well yes sorta. But the only methods risk you losing MOST/ALL of them. Assuming you even survive.

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Not when you're more than a memory.

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Neuralizer.

HornedLion posted...

Wouldnt the ability to erase that memory be beneficial?

Wouldnt it be a type of cure?

Does this exist?

Probably, obviously not, and not really (although apparently there are at least ways to suppress memories)

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It's called beer

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You mean like in that Kingdom Hearts game where Sora ascends Castle Oblivion because of a trap sprung by two of Organization XIII's traitors?
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EclairReturns posted...

You mean like in that Kingdom Hearts game where Sora ascends Castle Oblivion because of a trap sprung by two of Organization XIII's traitors?

Yes.

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you can't erase the memory but you can train yourself never to think of it by always interrupting any thoughts about it

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If you get hit on the head hard enough, youll forget quite a number of things.

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People in traumatic situations have basically done it themselves. Though, in those cases, it's more like suppressing. Either way, people can also forget certain things. And I think it's possible to replace a memory, or make someone else believe something else. Then there's Amnesia...
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Of course it's possible. The memory exists in your brain tangibly. We don't have any methods to accurately remove a single memory yet though but theres no reason it shouldn't be possible.

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YoukaiSlayer posted...

Of course it's possible. The memory exists in your brain tangibly. We don't have any methods to accurately remove a single memory yet though but theres no reason it shouldn't be possible.

And, in theory, once we figure out how to erase individual memories, figuring out how to synthesize new ones is just a matter of time. And then we get To the Moon.

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YoukaiSlayer posted...

Of course it's possible. The memory exists in your brain tangibly. We don't have any methods to accurately remove a single memory yet though but theres no reason it shouldn't be possible.

I don't think it's accurate to say memories are tangible. The hippocampus is the area of the brain where most parts of memory encoding and storage happen but like most everything else memories are a complex series of electrical impulses that are intertwined with other memories. It's part of the reason memory is so fallible. Every time you recall something it's being warped by your current situation and also everything similar to the specific event which happened before or after in your life. Even if a brain scan could identify the neurons associated with a particular memory you couldn't just blow them up without probably destroying other memories and also damaging your brain's ability to process/encode new memories going forward.

Short answer: no and probably never will be owing to the physiology of the brain.

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Electrical impulses are tangible regardless of how complex they are. I'll never understand these "we can't currently figure out and thus never will" areas of science, especially as it relates to the body.

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Lokarin posted...

It's called bleach

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YoukaiSlayer posted...

Electrical impulses are tangible regardless of how complex they are. I'll never understand these "we can't currently figure out and thus never will" areas of science, especially as it relates to the body.

Tangible means physically capable of being touched/manipulated, the implication being that the memory center of the human brain is like the surface of a record where memories are etched and can be replayed perfectly or altered. The electrical impulses that make up memories are fired between neurons and are not always present/static. You can't just catch them and rewrite or erase them. And it doesn't make sense in the laws of physics that you would be able to do so.

Normally yes, you're correct, it is unwise to presume it will never be possible to do something. But as far as memories, like I said, the whole system is extremely fluid and memories morph and merge together over time, so you could not remove a single memory without corrupting a lot of other things related to it or damaging the brain.

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You could figure out it's exact current effect on every other memory and part of the brain and address each of those parts individually while removing the memory. Nothing in the human body can't be measured, altered, or artificially created and inserted. We just don't have the tools to do a lot of it yet nor have we learned enough about how it works. Every doctor I talk to is so defeatist about the whole thing though. We can't do that, it can't be done. They act like these are ironclad rules just cause we haven't figured it out yet, even for stuff that is clearly possible like measuring the microbiome in the gut.

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Sure its possible to erase a memory. A simple tincture of everclear and depression may erase the memories of an eight hour period, however side effects can include cranial dehydration, vomitting, wishing for death and or warrent for arrest

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I think what TC is saying is that, "Is your brain like a hard driver where you can erase a memory, like a file, and keep the others intact. '


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YoukaiSlayer posted...

You could figure out it's exact current effect on every other memory and part of the brain and address each of those parts individually while removing the memory. Nothing in the human body can't be measured, altered, or artificially created and inserted. We just don't have the tools to do a lot of it yet nor have we learned enough about how it works. Every doctor I talk to is so defeatist about the whole thing though. We can't do that, it can't be done. They act like these are ironclad rules just cause we haven't figured it out yet, even for stuff that is clearly possible like measuring the microbiome in the gut.

Trying to measure one memory's effect on every other memory in the brain would be like trying to measure how every molecule of water is affecting the placement and movement of every other molecule of water in the entire ocean. It's a giant interconnected web of synapses. Maybe with the greatest supercomputer in human history you could somehow track it but that still doesn't mean there is any way to isolate and alter it. And assuming it would not have a cascading effect on other memories, which you could not do. It's one thing to model something on a computer and another to actually dig open a human brain and stick an instrument in there. Measuring a gut biome is a child's fisher price surgery playset by comparison.
Dmess85 posted...

I think what TC is saying is that, "Is your brain like a hard driver where you can erase a memory, like a file, and keep the others intact. '

Yes. That's what I'm answering. And it's a hard no.

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Furthermore as I mentioned the hippocampus is the primary memory center of the brain but it is far from the only section involved with the process. It could very well be the case that to isolate a single memory, if such a thing even exists in the strictest sense, you would have to go in and alter multiple parts of the brain, at which point you're increasing potential complications and unintended side effects exponentially.

**Also TC is using trauma as an example. A traumatic event is not an isolated memory in the sense of remembering a restaurant you stopped at one time. It's a complex event that influences behavior and other memories at all times going forward, so to effectively remove any trace of a trauma you'd need to erase every memory someone made since the event. Otherwise they'd just have holes in their memory and a lot of other memories that don't make sense because they now lack the context of the trauma that shaped them.

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man101 posted...

Trying to measure one memory's effect on every other memory in the brain would be like trying to measure how every molecule of water is affecting the placement and movement of every other molecule of water in the entire ocean. It's a giant interconnected web of synapses. Maybe with the greatest supercomputer in human history you could somehow track it but that still doesn't mean there is any way to isolate and alter it.

It's beyond our ability to comprehend and measure now, but it is finite and therefore within theoretical limits of our ability to measure. There's no known reason for it to never be possible, just the fact that it will be really hard.

Now, the ethical implications of it all are likely to mean that, even with the necessary technology, it might not actually go anywhere because nobody wants to mess with it. But that's another issue.

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