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Paycheck-Style Memory Erasure: How Close Are We?
Quirk writes "Scientific American takes a look at the movie Paycheck, based on Philip K. Dick's work of the same name. In the movie ...'a crack reverse engineer helps companies steal and improve upon the technology of their rivals, then has his memory of the time he spent working for them erased.' '...the main character gets several months' worth of his memories erased by having individual neurons zapped. Is that possible?'"
The brain is one of the least understood organs in our bodies, and tampering with it in any form is still quite tricky and dangerous. Sure, we might have a rough idea where your memory of your first day of school is, but erasing that and nothing else isn't something we're even close to. I'd say this is still at least 50 years away, and probably more like 100.
the answer is NO... or better, IT DEPENDS.
Have a bullet throug his brain, everything gets lost.
Now, how would you selectively sever thousand of connections that account for THAT SPECIFIC MEMORY.
We would have to have an immense knowlegde of the brain, and OF THE SAID BRAIN.
Impossible, AFAIK, today (and for the next 120 yrs. I would bet)
how long until
Can I erase reading that message?
No. You don't just form/strengthen one new connection for every memory. If we knew enough to erase memories, we would know enough to back them up too.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Slashdot editors have had this happen to them! That is why they we have repeat stories, sometimes one right after the other!
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
No.
Does anyone find the fact that part of the plot of the movie is spoiled in the flippin' article on the front page, disturbing?
------ ( Read More... | 666 of 682 comments )
No.
It's called a good jolt to the head, causing amnesia.
It happens to me all the time. An aquantance walks up to me an my brain selectively forgets their name.
But do I ever forget something useless like the theme song to Gilligan's Island? NOOOOOooooooOOOO!
At the very least, there would be physical evidence that a procedure like that had been performed. Doesn't seem like a very stealthy or effective technique when it would be possible to detect.
They tell you that much in the trailer and some of the longer commercials. It's a movie premise, not really a spoiler.
I don't remember, you insensitive clod.
if it's possible. The risks of becoming a cabbage for the rest of your life, or something akin to lobotomized are huge. Think of all those medical bills!
Seriously though, would you let a multinational corporation fiddle with your neurones? There's a whole lotta scope there for tampering. But the way lawyers seem to be proliferating into every part of life at the moment, having part of your brain erased as part of a contract can only be a few steps away...
I could have sworn I knew the answer to that question prior to my last job...
nuff said!
I'd just like to erase them [it]...
If a company hires someone to steal technology, if it's done carefully (i.e. no email records, no obvious plagiarism), the only way to prove it would be to crak open the guy's skull and download his memories. Since it's not possible, why would there be a need to erase the person's memory in the first place? As far as I know, the best proof it's possible is Microsoft: nobody there has been forcedly lobotomized, and the strong company culture ensures that employees think technology theft as survival of the fittest, fair game, corporate smartness or other brutal but honest reasons that won't conflict with employees' sense of morality.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Now it makes sense. This is clearly what happened to Sydney :)
It is called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It is the story of a couple who are having problems with their relationship, and have their memories of each other erased to see if it helps things.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I'd love to lighten my mind's burden of the two hours I spent last night watching Ben Affleck overact.
You just blew the premise of the movie in that post. Thanks!
JM: The dominant evidence that goes back over 50 years is that one can block or certainly reduce memories formed within the past several hours by treating human or animal subjects with electro-convulsive shock. But it's nonselective; whatever happened in that past several hours will be gone. And that's rather gross stimulation applied to the skull. What Larry Squire at UC San Diego has shown is that if human subjects are repeatedly given electro-convulsive shocks (several times a week for several weeks), they will have impaired global memory that goes back many months, but that memory will gradually recover. He did this in the late 1980s.
Notice how these types keep saying that this stuff is good for you ....
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
there are drugs, waves, and the mysterious taos hum, they all effect your memory and thinking. i don't think they would delete your memory though, more like mess with you psychologically.
You first
Philip K Dick is the author the short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. This is the story that the movie Total Recall was based on.
Just thought people might like to know this.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...of Ben Affleck's acting and John Woo's directing (with the exception of Broken Arrow, which I was mildly fond of).
Must have erased your painfull memories of Melissa, Blaster, SoBig etc.
You Pathetic troll, letting BillyG erase your logic circuits in return for a playskool interface.
who studies learning and memory, to explain what kinds of memory erasure are currently possible
What about the good old whack behind the head?
I _think_ that the memory is not stored in to single multiple neurons over a long period of time. instead i think that the neurons act more like a cell in a RAM. Disabling single nerons will be more like reducing a cell from a ram memory and will affect the total memory capacity rather than just a specific piece of memory.
Its probably just the beer speaking...
...winning a Nobel Prize than science is to understanding memory, let alone erasing it.
No. Things aren't that clean nor that simple. Memory in the brane goes a lot of different places. One might remeber what some chip name did even if one had no idea where one picked that up, one might remember what a certain shape part did. Besides it would be a lot simpler just to hire them through a third party that way they never know exactly who they are working for.
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
Procrastinators cramming for exams and late term papers may have the right idea.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Just look at all of the executives of Enron, MCI/Worldcon, and Anderson Consulting who don't remember what they did and when they did it while working!
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Someone actually did invent this, but he tried the technique on himself...
You can't take the sky from me...
... that when we finally figure out how it works, the brain will prove to be a multiresolution (read: holographic) storage device, rather than a simple network of interconnected neurons. It only makes sense, based on what we've seen in patients that have been injured by arrows, bullets, and other projectiles without losing any specific memories or abilities.
If that's true, then no, it won't ever be practical to identify the exact physical location of a particular memory, because there isn't one.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
The article says that by electrically shocking someone, you can "erase" their memories of the past few hours and even months.
I wonder if this is how the aliens do it?
See there is good reason for wearing a tin foil hat after all!
-joe
This technology is here today. People conveniently forget about atrocities when the price is right.
Witness the mainstream press forgetting that Donald Rumsfeld, an official of the US govt, shook hands with Saddam during the 80s, or helped sell nuclear reactors to the North Koreans during his stint as a ABB executive. Or that George Bush II's father was VP when Saddam gassed Kurds.
Money is a good neural solvent. Sniff it up, America.
-Alex
It's called pot.
Who put this pizza crust in my mouth?
I know it's kind of "new-agey", but there is a lot of discussion about cellular memory where heart transplant recipients have memories of their donors'.
If it's true, then I doubt zapping a few of the right neurons in the brain would really work.
Sure it's possible, it just turned out to be a really really bad thing so we erased our memories of how to do it.
Just as fractal math lead to patterns, so does our memories in our brains have patterns to them. You can almost imagine parts of our brain as being holographic. In that, parts of redundant information is found in verious places. ...at least so I've read. Some would say it's the brains way of setting up a RAID5 system. When a few neurons die, others are their to take their place and rebuild the data best as possible.
Life is not for the lazy.
Yep I'm flaming, but I could not resist:
I know, the best proof it's possible is Microsoft: nobody there has been forcedly lobotomized, and the strong company culture ensures that employees think technology theft as survival of the fittest, fair game, corporate smartness or other brutal but honest reasons that won't conflict with employees' sense of morality.
Can you show proof that no one at MS has been lobotomized? Either a lobotomy or low moral standards are the root cause of the tripe they market to the consumer.
So which is it, the icepick to the forhead? Or is it that they hire no one with a shred of decency for the marketing department?
There's one kind of "memory erasure" that's possible, but it wouldn't be very useful for this kind of application.
There's a condition known as "anterograde amnesia", where the short term memories never get laid down as long term memories... so you can remember what you were doing a few seconds ago, but you have no idea what you were doing an hour ago. Conceivably this could be imposed, and if you were still capable of doing useful work you could do it and have no long-term memories of what happened.
The problem is that this wouldn't apply to something that took more than a few minutes of connected thought. You wouldn't be able to get three years of development out of someone under these conditions.
But... what if you could remind yourself and make notes quickly enough?
There's a short story I've been trying to write for a year or so, now (and doing poorly at... I have no problem coming up with the crazy ideas, I just suck at dialog and plot and that kind of thing) and it turns on this.
I start out with a technology that was (in this future history) developed for video games. It takes practice, but with a little work you can "save" and "read" messages and eventually memories and skills offline, in a game cartridge. This means, when you're playing Final Fantasy XCII you can remember (if you want) what 'Cloud' or 'Yufffie' know... when you're playing that character.
So what happens when your gamer has anterograde amnesia? Why, he has memories he can access in the cartridge that can't be laid down in long term memory. They're not quite the same as the real thing, but they're good enough for his job. So he goes in to work each day, has his long term memory disabled, and gets his work persona plugged in. He could even work on mutually untrusting secret projects without breaking security.
The story starts from there, and I won't try and tell it now (besides, as I said, it sucks, except for the twist at the end... my daughter really liked the twist at the end). BUT... this seems like something that may be a bit closer to realistic than being able to unwind organic memory that specifically.
Sure. I saw it in a documentary with Requel Welsh _decades_ ago. But the blood/brain barrier can be difficult to pass for the little ship carrying the researchers.
What do you do with someone that planned for 3 months to commit murder and then erases the last 4 months of their memory?
This new person (post erasure) is innocent.
If only SCO knew about this technology earlier... All of their Ex-Employees would have had their minds zapped. :oP
I like to use a baseball bat. What do you use?
If it was possible to both erase and replace memories, we would have another elective procedure which would be in the same category as plastic surgery. Imagine, if you could reconstruct your memories as well as your crooked nose, enhance your childhood as well as breast size. Bad experience holding you back? Just get it augmented or deleted. Those memories of growing up under-priviledge could be replaced with a happy childhood. Who wouldn't want the advantage of living (at least recalling) a perfect life.
Because of the way the brain stores its memories, aside from whether you could read someone's entire brain structure, edit it, then replace it completely, it would be impossible to erase several months worth of memories from someone's brain completely without causing some serious side effects. So many associations would have to be broken that the person would be reduced to a babbling idiot.
Now, if you wanted to erase someone's memory of the last few HOURS, that's a whole 'nother matter.
It will always be easier to kill or kidnap a person than to try and erase portions of their memory. By the time you have someone in some kind of clinical setting you will have already taken as much risk as silencing them some other way. Those people who would be tempted to erase memory probably aren't morally against doing other simpler less expensive physical harm to protect a secret.
Yawn.
Hi
/ altbooks/
I have made an eigenpoll for comparing books on accelerated learning techniques.
http://all-technology.com/eigenpolls
You use it by comparing the books you have read and then
it does some data mining and find the best book.
Please feel free to add missing books.
Currently it haves the following books:
The Einstein Factor
Photoreading
Power Reading
Your Memory
Natural Brilliance
Accelerated Learning Handbook
AL for the 21st Century
What to Say
The AL FieldBook
Intelligent Memory
The Memory Bible
Saving Your Brain
Exercises for the Whole Brain
Building Mental Muscle
Keep Your Brain Alive
The Memory Workbook
Knud
...for sticking in the most obvious, cheesy, cliched line you can have whenever you're doing a man-on-the-run, stolen-identity story.
"YOU WIPED MY MEMORY!"
I can't help but laugh at Ben Affleck delivering this. "Tell us what happened." "I can't. You wiped my memory!"
Ben's voice echoes in my mind amidst maniacal laughter at the copiousness of its cheese. "YOU WIPED MY MEMORY!"
Do I blame myself? When I first heard the premise of yet another bastardized Phillip K. Dick movie and saw that Ben Affleck was in it, and heard that it was about his memory being erased (gee, that's never been done before), why did I immediately expect that exact line to be inserted somewhere in the trailer? "YOU WIPED MY MEMORY!" It's like I wanted it to be there, like touching a sore tooth.
Anyone else remember, "He's got a bomb in his RIBCAGE!" That other Phillip Dick movie and its cheesy line repeated over and over in all the trailers actually became a running gag over at Ain't-It-Cool talkbacks. "HE'S GOT A BOMB IN HIS RIBCAGE!"
Now I have "HE'S GOT A BOMB IN HIS RIBCAGE!" and "YOU WIPED MY MEMORY!" battling each other surrounded by torrents of laughter in my mind.
Help me. "YOU WIPED MY MEMORY!"
"Sufferin' succotash."
We have no idea where all memories are stored.
Infact we know so little, and human memory capabilities are so amazing, that is has been suggested that cells from all parts of one's body may be capable of storing memories.
"My client has no know of that incident since losing a part of his left foot your honour"
Sounds like something regularly employed by certain SCO executives
I'm sure they must use it, else how could they make certain statements one month, then contradict themselves another month.
That's from an article on the site of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics which was published a few weeks ago. It also has several links to more information.
If not, I may be stuck with the haunting image of Gigli in my skull until the end of my days.
We have absolutly no idea how most memory works. A very small amount of knowlage has been gained about how we learn motor actions (for example, how to type, how to ride a bike, but thats about it)
We also know how some very simple invertibrets 'learn' things, but these beings have a hardwired nervious system (every neuron is connected to all the same neurons in each animal, like an electronic circuit, rather then being grown chaoticaly as in higher life forms)
To date, no one has ever found an engram, or a physical representation of a memory in a human.
It's a long way off.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You're asking if an idea from a Phillip K Dick book 'is feasible'?? I just got through reading a bunch of interesting stuff linked to from comments on the last Slashdot PKD story, excellent stuff especially as I have 'Eye in the Sky' sitting waiting for me when I get back from me holidays - anyway Google for the recent Hermenaut essay and take especial note of the stuff about how questioning the very basis of reality is one of the quintessential PKD themes. It's nto so much "is it feasible" as "how do you know it's not already happening? How do you know you aren;t actually a secret ninja reverse engineer who's just completed a big gig and had his/her brain zapped as part of the deal?"
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Yeah, just what we need, another low-grade "sci-fi writer" trying to come up with self-important stories that he claims have twists that his humoring daughter likes. Go back to posting at Slashdot.
Hate to be a nitpicker, but buying a company's product, taking it apart, and learning how it works is not stealing. It doesn't matter if you're the company's competitor, it still isn't stealing. You have a perfect right to do this, and employ the knowledge gained to your own advantage.
Now, if the technologies in the product are patented, and you built and sold your own products based on them, then you'd have a case of patent infringement. Which still isn't stealing.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I know people who have had ECT (electro conculsive therapy) because of severe depression, and some of them have huge memory gaps of a year or more. (It also affects short term memory and the ability to retain new thoughts. If you are ever in a situation and offered it as an option, turn it down).
Now can they control what memories are zapped? Not yet, but they certainly nailed them for the few months before hand and some earlier years.
I saw Paycheck half a day ago, and strongly wish I could erase that perticular memory.
As for the plausibility of erasing specific memories..
In the movie, the head-fscking machine had pedagogic monitors displaying individual neurons being "zapped"; electromagnetics? (and Affleck frowning, as if brain cells could feel..) And yeah, good luck with zapping neurons to erase memories; one down, 53 billion to go...
From what little I've read about how the brain is thought to work (consciousness being a "real-time", emergent "supernetwork effect" of sorts), I wouldn't bet on us ever having enough knowledge to tinker with the mind with any kind of higher precision.
668.5
Given that one is already taking part in illicit activities, would it not be cheaper for the company just to liquidate the individual performing the said activities. It would seem as if this would be the best option, seeing as the premise for Paycheck is someone trying to recover their lost memory. Take care of the person and you eliminate this possibility.
What a funny coincidence. I just got the whole UFO DVD set for christmas, and they have a nifty "amnesia" drug they administer to everyone who come accross their secret bases...
Memories are tied to time in someway or another...
in high school, I got a concussion on a mountain biking trail in the rockies...
afterwords I couldn't (and still can't) remember anything that had happened for about a week previous to the accident, but everything before that is fine.
I find the 'second' type of memory wipe in the movie to be the more plausible. They inject him with a radioactive marker, then he goes to work. Time to erase his memory, they re-inject him and that takes care of any new information made after the radioactive marker. The injected stuff in the second case would probably have to be some type of nanite that can get in there and just take out the 'marked' cells.
I highly doubt we'll be able to get actual 'visuals' out of a person's head in anything resembling the near term, though.
What is te problem with the technique to erase memory? The workings of our brain! We do not reserve a seperate space of memory for every seperate thing we do, but spread it over alot of neurons (unlike longterm computer storage). This happens in two stages, just as our cache and secondary storage works in our PC. The 'cache' can actually be erased (some say it will happen each night during our dreams), but the longterm storage cannot, unless we also remove other memories.
Maybe this can best be compared with taking a large bag of stones and putting the stones one after another in alot of similar buckets. Each stone represents a memory and strengtens percepts with actions and other percepts. Percepts that are very particular (such as your first kiss, first working day, your own wedding day, etc. etc.), are stored connected with these events, and that makes them easy to recall. Percepts that are not particular (a random kiss, a random working day, a weddding day of yet another family member), are stored connected with each other, and are harder to recall. If you want to remove all events with a particular company for example, you would also have to remove (or damage) parts of other working days with other companies. Imagine your sexual attraction with one of your co-workers. Removing all of these thoughts would most likely damage other romantic thouhgts as well.
Another way to think of it is like a hologram. In a hologram, every part of the material 'more or less' represents every part of the image. The only way to delete the image (or part of it) is by imprinting another image over it, or destroying the material.
Hope this clears stuff up. In short, neural nets work by storing information seperated over all neurons, removing one thought will remove similars as well. Time is not so important here, percepts are.
This is a replacement signature.
Is that possible?
No.
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
someone would wipe the memory of that movie from my mind.
... except maybe this. Computer neural networks are modelled on how we think the human brain works and so the following possibly applies to the human brain too.
Say you have a computer simulated neural network consisting of 10 neurons, and it can classify 20 different inputs into one of 3 different outputs. The network as a whole 'knows' how to do the classification, the combination of all neurons is responsible for the outcome. In order to adjust it so that it mis-classified one of the 20 inputs, you would most likely have to adjust the weighting (connection) of each neuron, or at least several.
Have you ever done a Rubix(sp?) Cube? Cheating aside, it's quite tricky to move only selected pieces around without mucking up the rest. Each single action you perform affects multiple pieces. You need to make numerous single gross movements to have a net fine movement. Tinkering with the human brain is probably a lot like that only much much trickier. And without the pretty colors. And you can't pull it apart and put it back together, or just move the labels around to do what you want. And if you tried to manipulate a brain like you do a cube you'd probably get your hands a lot dirtier. Okay... maybe it wasn't such a good analogy.
IANABD (Brain Doctor), but remember, the connections between neurons in the brain aren't electronic like you might think of computer memory as electronic. The interaction between them is, partly, but the actual physical connection isn't and as I understand it, the connection configuration is where the 'information' is stored. In order to get in and physically change connections you'd have to be tinkering with the actual neuron cells, requiring physical interaction which would be really hard for anything not on the surface.
I guess that leaves us with drugs, brainwashing, or tiny little robots, or something we haven't thought of yet. Far simpler to simply pay someone lots of money to pretend they've forgotten the thing you wanted to erase.
Now granted memory is a combination of forming new connections and strengthening or weakening others. But I suspect severing all new connections formed in a tight time frame would have the desired effect, and would probably only require the right chemical agent latching onto the specially designed tagging agent which as been bound to the sites of all new connections. How these tagging and latching agents are activated, and how they would actually sever the new connections I will not speculate. For an even more thorough wiping, recently strengthened and weakened connections could also be tagged and severed, but at the risk of losing more memory than intended.
Good God! I have probably just inspired some research project.
Letter To Iran
Feel the need to yammer on like this?
Wtf does "multiresolution" have to do with the word "holographic" would it kill people to learn how to communicate (i.e. not be retards?)
Anyway, we do know how the brain works. It's been studied for a century and more research goes on every day. No one has ever uncovered any evidence that its anything other then a neural network. If you look at a centuries worth of scientific research, "it only makes sense".
In fact, there are lots of localized, spesific parts of the brain that, if damaged do cause you to lose skills. Sure, if you knock out some of the cerebral cortex, you might be OK. But if you take out the hypothalimus (for example) you will not be able to record any new non-motor memories (a motor memory would be like learning to ride a bike or type).
btw, I don't have access to a spellchecker, sorry for any errors.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Therefore the most immediate hope of memory erasure is to interrupt the path of recall. This would not likely result in permanent erasure, as the brain seems to be good at creating new path to old memories, especially when confronted with similar stimulus, but it would be good enough for many purposes
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Does this mean that a RAID5 array will start making up data off the top of its processor? If so, I think I know how SCO's legal team plans to prove their case...
Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
You've never been to college, have you? I can "zap" several million neurons over the course of a single weekend.
Thanks to modern technology, many "mind altering" concoctions are available, over the counter, for public consumption! Pay attention to the various ingredients as "malted hops" or "barley" seem to be the most popular.
Avoid those cheap alternatives like "Mad Dog 20/20" or "Boone's Farm" which can be purchased by broke college students for under $3 US dollars.
Happy zapping!
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Electroshock therapy is sometimes used for clinical depression. It is said that the depression is relieved because patients "forget what they were depressed about." This would suggest a very blunt instrument for erasing long term memories. By "long term", I mean memories that are older than a day. However, memories a minute old work differently than memories an hour or two old, and these work differently than permanent memories. There may be more divisions that we are aware.
But it is quite clear that a device where the amount of time to erase from memory can be adjusted by dial is simply not possible. And content selective memory erasure is likewise impossible. But remember, just because it was in a sci-fi doesn't make it totally false.
...that I have a perfect memory?
Celebrate the finer things in life
It's almost like some movie execs were sitting around and someone said "I'd love to make an interesting thriller with great twists and a killer core concept, but I don't want the mildly retarded to have a hard time following the plot."
Sorry, won't work.
Memories are probably not formed by making new 'connections' but by inhibiting or uninhibiting connections that already exist. So for example, if two already connected neurons are both fired at the same time, a certain chemical will be released, which causes proteins to be created that cause the post-synaptic (i.e. the one that receives the signal) to be more sensitive to the other one.
So you can't just look for new connections, but actually count the number of receptor pathways in each synapse. Those pathways are individual molecules large enough to allow individual ions through, so it's extreemly unlikely that you'd ever find them on any kind of scan.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Apparently the audience for Paycheck forgot the plots been done before in Total Recall.
Then again, an action movie was never really full of plot.
Tim, they got your wife!
But I'm not married.
You are now, to America.
God spoke to me
what seems sillier is the idea that in a quasi near future that there is such a thing as a "reverse engineer" [whips out his business card mini cd]. hearing that job title made me nearly choke up my popcorn during the preview (or maybe it was just the fact that very non-nerdy affleck was cast in such a role).
unless said brain manipulation is used to augment the human brain's capacity for interdisciplinary science and engineering knowledge, i predict that a metrosexual frat boy like affleck couldn't even get an interview for such a position in any quasi-futuristic timeline.
fah-q!
It's called prime time TV =)
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
/me smacks you on the head with a large rock
I was recently looking over my college transcript (class of 94) and saw classes I could only vaguely remember taking.
... according to the CIA (And this is real, declassified stuff that you can look up. I don't recall the exact file numbers off the top of my head. I will post again later with them), back in the 70's they were able to make "primates" (does that include people? How much do you trust your government?) perform complex actions against their will (standing, sitting, walking around, etc.) simply with electro-magnetic radiation that would effect the way that the neurons in the brain fired. In theory it could probably go the other way and just zap them all together. Just something to chew on.
And I figured out how to do it
I just can't remember how I did it.
Let's make a difference
You can make a man forget all kinds of stuff by showing him a woman in the right state!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Going on evidence from brain-injured patients, it's a lot easier to prevent the formation of new memories (anterograde amnesia) than to prevent the retrieval of old memories (retrograde amnesia), where "old" and "new" are relative to the injury, procedure, or whatever. Although anterograde amnesia often includes a retrograde component, it's supposed to follow a temporal gradient -- the most recent memories are the first to go. Blocking a specific set of memories (e.g., your high school years) would seem like a pretty distant prospect for now.
There are many labs studying the neural underpinings of memory (mine included), but there is hardly any broad agreement on how things work, which bears on how easy this would be to do. In particular, there is no consensus that it makes any sense to discuss where a particular memory is stored. It may be that it would take dismantling and reassembling someone's entire neural connectivity to do this effectively, which is certainly well out of reach now.
removing those goatse.cx mental scars.
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
Booya!!!!!!!! :-) weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
... of coure it's possible! Didn't you see "Men in black"? :)
Heck, I was doing that in my early twenties with Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboys, orange microdots and Black Beauties.
That should do the trick
I'm not sure this was mentioned elsewhere, but every psychology student learns about the patient H.M., who underwent a complete hippocampal lombotomy to treat his severe epilepsy (thankfully, they no longer do this drastic surgery today).
Long story short; by completely removing his hippocampus, researchers discovered that they eliminated H.M.'s ability to form new memories, and that existing memories for a certain time prior to the operation were erased. H.M. can hold a conversation with you, but within a few minutes he will have forgotten what he was just talking about, and who he was talking to.
I'm not sure what the current research is, but it is widely believed that newly formed memories take some time to become permanent. Of course, the length of time and the specific brain regions involved are still under debate, but any good electrial disturbance to your brain (a siezure, for instance, or getting knocked really hard on your head), will distrupt this system and will wipe out any memories that you have recently acquired.
And, the larger the disruption, the longer the period of time that gets erased, some believe.
This phenomenon of retrograde amnesia has been the center of the debate about the human memory system for a number of decades now. (This was the subject of my last presentation as an undergrad at UIUC, by the way.)
for great justice, this sig has been moved
Agreed. I saw this movie several days ago as part of a "sneak preview". I'm so glad I did not pay one red cent for that movie as it was quite awful. Some parts about it were slightly intriguing but not really that great. The concept of the mind erasure was intriguing but not feasible.
Perhaps I should have taken the time to warn more people about this terrible movie. It may not have cost me any money but it took two hours of my life.
Spoiler: How about those over the top car explosions in the motorcycle chase scenes? That was especially awful! The methods he employed to solve those clues seemed fairly over the top and overly contrived as well.
*
troll blacklist. Please mo
Erasing my memories of the previous night for 2 decades.
it was called Johnny Mnemonic. Why would I like it now?
Outdoor storage sheds and pet kennels
Yes, I'm sure it's likely the information is stored in a distributed manner. The terms holographic and fractal are certainly very relevant.
Since large portions of the cerebrum can be surgically removed without a patient losing memory, certainly zapping individual neurons will be even less feasible for the erasure of memory.
In an artificial neural network, even simple information is typically stored as patterns of connection weights between many neurons.
The director (Woo) has made possibly the two worst movies of all time. I expect no less than a threepeat.
I was talking with a friend recently about some of the implications of memory erasure, and she said she'd recently discovered that for a number of medical procedures, it's already common practice to administer a drug (other than anaesthesia) that impairs the ability to form memories... she started digging for information about this because (1) resistance to anaesthesia (and therefore a nasty tendency to become partly to fully conscious partway through a procedure) runs in her family, and they'd been looking at the drugs they were given and (2) she's a para, and was interested in legal implications.
Anyone know anything else about this?
Tweet, tweet.
For what it's worth, there is a drug called VERSED (pronounced vur-said, two syllables) that is generally classified as "a sedative," one of whose properties is that it erases your memory of whatever you experienced while under sedation.
According to its maker, Roche Laboratories, "in one study, 73% of the patients who received intramuscularly had no recall of memory cards shown 30 minutes after drug administration."
It is commonly used during colonoscopies, not because colonoscopies are terribly traumatic, but because it provides superior muscular relaxation and enhances the effect of fentanyl (an anesthetic agent).
Nevertheless, the manufacturer describes it as "an agent for sedation/anxiolysis/amnesia;" that is, amnesia is considered to be one of the purposes for which it might be administered.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
... hypnosis?
Such memory erasure is already possible. I saw it in a Harry Potter movie ;)
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Very simple recipe:
1 shot kahlua
1 shot vodka
club soda
Just another freak in the freak kingdom.
Just the memory of goatse.cx is enough.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
I know this is a little off topic, but here something that really irritates me about this movie. The guy had enough time to put together these clues to help him figure out his past, but why didn't he just write himself a letter explaining everything? I have not seen the movie, so I am not sure if there was some explanation as to why he could not do that. Therefore here is a second part to my rant. If he couldn't just write himself a letter and found these articles and his memory was erased, then why would he suspect from these objects that his memory was erased? Wouldn't he have just seen the articles and went: "well, this is strange," and continued on with his life?
Scienceblog has a bit on..."a new process for how memories might be stored, a finding that could help explain one of the least-understood activities of the brain. What's more, the key player in this process is a protein that acts just like a prion - a class of proteins that includes the deadly agents involved in neurodegenerative conditions such as mad cow disease."
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Didn't Matt Damon just do a movie about losing his memory and trying to figure out what the hell is going on? (The Bourne Identity) Why's Ben got to go do the same thing? The Bourne Identity was good (aside from that pumpkin-headed Julia Stiles mis-cast) but I can't imagine Paycheck will be any good. Maybe if the premise was that Ben was trying to forget why he ever dated J-Lo, it'd be worth seeing...
"Any decent brand o' Scotch 'll do that!"
What is the genesis of the title Blade Runner?
One obvious nasty side effect to this procedure as demonstrated in Paycheck is that it makes Seattle look identical to Vancouver, BC to the patient.
Why individual nurons? Just beating myself on head till I forget movie happened and Until I forget this story exi.. who what
welcome our new... Rats. I forgot.
- we pay someone to do high-tech industrial espionage/reverse engineering
- we then erase his memories of said activity, so that there's NO EVIDENCE of what we've done
Of course, that's ignoring the (vastly overwhelming and still existing) evidenceAt least if we're doing magic with not-currently-available-technology in the interest of a plot, PLEASE stick to the logically consistent eg
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Technology ?
Who need technolgy for this ? Long term torture will suffice nicley.
SA: Are there any ways to erase memories by stimulating the brain?
JM: The dominant evidence that goes back over 50 years is that one can block or certainly reduce memories formed within the past several hours by treating human or animal subjects with electro-convulsive shock. But it's nonselective; whatever happened in that past several hours will be gone. And that's rather gross stimulation applied to the skull. What Larry Squire at UC San Diego has shown is that if human subjects are repeatedly given electro-convulsive shocks (several times a week for several weeks), they will have impaired global memory that goes back many months, but that memory will gradually recover. He did this in the late 1980s.
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
*naiv* Uhm, shouldnt you sue makes of the movie momento for stealing your idea? =) *naiv*
I could have sworn I knew the answer to that question prior to my last job...
...flipping burgers at McDonalds zaps all your neurons, as they commit suicide from boredom. We're talking about something wiping only specific parts of the brain here.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Not even remotely close judging from this turd of a topic.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
i'm drunk and i'mhigi anfdi'm not going to remdejeber m,ubh tomorrow
Here at the smirnoff institute, we have so far successfully permamently erased memories up to nearly a day, by combining vodka, whiskey and intermittent beers. We are attempting to increase the amount of memory erased by increasing the dosage but have thus far reached an upper limit (vomitus). However, the research is promising, with subjects not remembering who they fought with, or whose legs they broke.
I don't believe anyone in neurobiology believes in the grandmother cell. It's still used to describe how memory might work, but everything we know about the brain indicates distributed storage.
There are cells dedicated to specific purposes more general than grandmother recognition. These functional areas are dedicated to things like speaking or understanding speech (seperate areas of the brain.) For another example, everything you see is pretty much projected onto the neurons on the surface your occipital lobe.
A person with brain injury can lose specific skills or abilities. My grandmother lost the ability to speak after a stroke. She relearned to speak.
They can lose types of memory. People with Korsakoff's syndrome live with no intermediate or long term memory. Loss of short term memory preceding a traumatic event is more common. After an accident it is common for the injured party to not remember the moments leading up to the accident, because that information essentially never got written to intermediate or long term memory.
But the current view is that memory is highly distributed. If you use a neural net as a trivial model of how the brain might work, you will realize that for a large and complex neural net with diverse purposes, there isn't a single cell devoted to anything. All the information is contained in the strength connections between cells.
Karl Pribram used the phrase "holographic brain." The image on a hologram is distributed, so if you break it in two, you have two complete images, although each is less detailed. If you scratch a hologram, you don't lose part of the image, you lose detail overall.
There are drugs that prevent short term memory from being retained. Those drugs also keep you from being very alert or useful for anything, and the only people who use them to that purpose are rapists.
So, to answer the poster's question: No way.
Crude manipulation of the mind is hard. Hypnosis can't make you do something you'd be unwilling to do otherwise. Truth serums ain't. Lie detectors don't. I'd suggest that truth serums & lie detectors are far simpler tasks than erasing human memory based on content.
The brain is just too vast & complex for such a trivial approach. You need to use something subtle and powerful to manipulate the mind, like advertising or religion.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
You remember that one episode of farscape, when Crichton was trying to get Scorpius out of his brain and the doctor alien guy was trying to find which memories he could take out, and he checked that one part of his brain and Chrichton was like "American politics from Nixon to Clinton, dump it."? ...That was cool.
'...the main character gets several months' worth of his memories erased by having individual neurons zapped. Is that possible?'
Yeah. It's called beer.
I know a few people suffer from memory erasure the morning after they get their paycheck. They remember cashing it, then it's just blurred neon lights, gorgeous women and confusion as to how their shorts ended up full of peanut shells and why they woke up in an alley.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I made the mistake of taking my girlfriend (A neuroscience major) to this movie. Afterwords it was just how terrible it was and zapping single cells couldn't possibly have such an effect. (She also said the chemical method may be possible except for some semantics that would have to be worked out). Either way, I naturally looked at it from a more hardware-oriented perspective, as though these cells were critical to the addressing of certain memory sets and by removing them it would have the effect of denying access to same.
Of course she quickly stated that such a concept of memory was impossible, so I asked exactly how memories were stored.
She said it wasn't yet understood. Go figure.
What the heck is a 'sig'?
Why do you think there are so many
rehashed stories here on slashdot everyday
that have been told before right here
in the same exact place and format
before.
Consequently, all my code is very heavily documented. Everybody loves my, uh, "professionalism" about this, but really I do it so I can keep track of what the hell I'm doing...
by Slashdot and crew.
real geeks hate soap operas.
It's called the American Media.
Paycheck-Style Memory Erasure: How Close Are We?
For me, we are already there:
1) Get Paycheck
2) Cash Paycheck at Bar
3) Drink Paycheck (figuratively, of course)
4) Voila! Memory Erased.
The Men in Black took it!
SWEET!
Pass the gin.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Some places (and bosses) i've worked for i've choosen to forget about to get rid of the nightmares - And it didn't cost the company a cent to make me do it.
Gigli?
What's that?
Imagine being able to wipe a few neurons and lose several months of complete memory. This is absurd , it is like suggesting that everytime I have beer that i lose several months of memory. Sure if i lose a VERY LARGE amount of neurons for binge drinking for several years then i will have significant memory loss, but this is on many levels including anterograde and retrograde amnesia. Although the preiminent philosophers love to argue this topic into the ground it is the view of several that the brain should be considered like a giant recurrent network. There is a lot of theory behind this view but i will try to presnt some of it. First it is well known that there are several oscilatory waves travelling through segments of the brain. These waves travel around and around in endless loops and often themselves from part of larger waves. It is thought that the information encapsulated in these waves are how the brain works. Therefore a snapshot of memory at any timepoint would consist of an image of the entire recurrent wave at a particular timepoint. Now it is also known that memory has something to do with strengthening neural connections. However depending on the neuron these have hundreds to thousands of connections with other neurons and memory is defined as to how the recurrent network traverses millions of links... Think that your memory is the state of the whole device rather than the device itself. Therefore we have that destroying individual neurons will reduce tiny parts of the memory in wierd ways, will perhaps reduce the resolution of the memory but not the memory itself. We would also wipe out large parts of memory that were there before htis time period. But technically it could be possible to recreate memories, and/or delete old memories. I theorise that to do this one would need an accurate snapshot of the absolute relative strength of every synapse at a certian point of time. One would also need to have an accurate picture of the state of recurrent network at this point. One could theoretically change all the synapse strengths back to that which they were previously, and bootstrap the recurrent network to the required value. Technical challanges .. reading state of synapses in the brain, reading recurrent networks at individual neuron level, "burning in" changes to synaptic network strength, and introducing a new recurrent network program to the brain - it is possible that this could be achieved by tegmental magnetic stimulation (TMS), a way of stimulating neurons with magnetic forces.
We may already have a way to reset the recurrent networks in the brain ... electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). It is thought that ECT works by resting the brains recurrent patterns, requiring it to kinda bootstrap itself into a postition of working again. I read that another poster thought that ECT was barbaric, i know several people that have had ECT and they describe it as the most amazing experience ever. SEveral of them would recommend it to normal healthy people as a good "buzz"
Anyway had my rant for now, us Cognitive scientist types get touchy when people misrepresent how we think the brain works
Cheers :-)
When a person learns something, this information is stored in the overall structure of the brain. In short the connections between the neurons is what makes up our memories, not the individual neurons themselves.
It's impossible to tell where memories would be stored and if they are stored, then would a single memory reside in one place in the brain or in multiple places? The current evidence points to the idea that memories are stored in serveral desparate areas of the brain and in no predictable pattern. This means that it would be impossible to tell in each person where the last 24 hours of memories have been stored.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
that would suck if I accidentally formatted my brain
In the sci-fi thriller Paycheck, an engineer has his memory erased after completing a sensitive job. Scientific American.com spoke with a leading neurobiologist to find out just how close scientists are to controlling recall.
By JR Minkel
In the movie Paycheck, opening Christmas Day, a crack reverse engineer helps companies steal and improve upon the technology of their rivals, then has his memory of the time he spent working for them erased. The story, based on Philip K. Dick's sci-fi thriller of the same name, is set in the near future, but such selective memory erasure is still highly speculative at best. ScientificAmerican.com asked neurobiologist James McGaugh of the University of California at Irvine, who studies learning and memory, to explain what kinds of memory erasure are currently possible. For more information, see his book Memory and Emotion: The Making of Lasting Memories, released in 2003.
Scientific American.com: Early in Paycheck we see the main character get several months' worth of his memories erased by having individual neurons zapped. Is that possible?
JM: No. First of all there is no evidence of memories being stored individually. And even if they were stored in individual neurons, no one would know where they were. What we know an awful lot about are the brain systems that are involved in storing memories. Your memories of this conversation, for example, are stored rather diffusely in the brain. They're not going to be stored in a couple of neurons someplace that anybody could easily identify.
SA: But haven't surgeons poked people's brains in certain spots and made them recall specific things?
JM: [In the 1950s] Wilder Penfield up at the Montreal Neurological Institute was doing surgery for people who had brain seizures, and he had to stimulate the brain and have people talk to make sure that he wouldn't eliminate speech areas, for example. He found that he could evoke some things that appeared to be like memories, but it's more likely that he was just evoking [an impression of] something, not a specific memory.
SA: Are there any ways to erase memories by stimulating the brain?
JM: The dominant evidence that goes back over 50 years is that one can block or certainly reduce memories formed within the past several hours by treating human or animal subjects with electro-convulsive shock. But it's nonselective; whatever happened in that past several hours will be gone. And that's rather gross stimulation applied to the skull. What Larry Squire at UC San Diego has shown is that if human subjects are repeatedly given electro-convulsive shocks (several times a week for several weeks), they will have impaired global memory that goes back many months, but that memory will gradually recover. He did this in the late 1980s.
SA: Are there any more selective ways to erase memory?
JM: If one work with the hippocampus, one can selectively remove animals' memories of places where they have received training. In the Morris water maze, for example, animals are trained to swim from a variety of regions [in] a six-foot tank to an invisible platform located about two centimeters below the surface of the water. That kind of learning requires the hippocampus. If the hippocampus is blocked electrically or chemically within a few hours after animals have been trained to go that spot, they will not remember it the next day. So that would be an example of a place memory that could be influenced by discrete stimulation of a specific region of the brain. This doesn't mean the memory is permanently stored there. It means that the hippocampus is involved in the processing of that information, which is ultimately stored someplace else. And it's not something that could be done by electrical stimulation applied outside of the brain except for electro-convulsive shock, which activates the entire brain.
SA: How do we know memories aren't stored in the hippocampus?
JM: If subjects are taught something and then the hippocampus is removed s
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
cool! You work somewhere there is a marketing department with moral fiber?! I want to work there. Mine keeps selling things we dont even make.
Don't worry, the answer was "No."
With magnetic brain imaging using SQUIDs (which can located brain activity in real time) and gamma knife technology, which can destroy specific pieces of brain tissue without opening up a person's head, why wouldn't this be possible? We're still at the blunt intrument stage from both the sensor point of view and the neuron destruction point of view, but we're a lot closer than many people may think.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Posting AC, because the liberal bias would otherwise crucify me.
Tis the season... no wait, that's Easter...
What did it for me (apart from the non-existent acting/directing), was the double-plus-dumb premises:
668.5
See subject, please.
>...the main character gets several months' worth of his memories erased by having individual neurons zapped. Is that possible?'"
:)
This happens to me all the time
sheep
The MPAA and RIAA have been working very hard to stamp out any unauthorized copies of their products, no matter where they may be.
Memories are a form of copying.
To deal with the problem of unauthorized memory of a motion picture or sound performance, they have created movies and music that cannot be remembered within hours or even minutes of being viewed or listened to.
You thought that the vacuformed movies and music were just a lack of production values, when in fact, they are part of a very carefully planned plot against you remembering anything involved with the movie in question. (How else can they sell DVDs of movies like "Crossroads" or "The Animal"?)
Soon they will have perfected the technology to the point where you will be unable to remember a movie while you are still watching it. Some claim that this has already been done. They may be right.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
I guess I wasn't clear. I meant that memories in the brain create all sorts of strengthening and weakening, and its not just some simple 1:1 memory to neural connection. Altering a large number of potentials between neurons to erase one memory would surely mess up a lot of other memories: "There go my piano lessons!" ;)
Backing up the brain is conceivable an easier thing, as it's a read-only operation, however the brain would have to be in a state of suspended animation to not cause any consistency errors: lock the object before reading so other systems can write to it - the poor human brain has no locking mechanism. Tsk tsk, puny humans.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Also, for brain surgery, it's common to map out very specific functions via localized electrical stimulation to the exposed brain (with oral feedback from the conscious patient!). This is done so the surgeon can minimize damage to vital areas.
Probably most functions/behaviors/memories are not simple and localized, but a few seem to be. Certainly the ones that are localized could be easily disabled/killed through physical/chemical trauma.
If done for nefarious reasons this would be a horrific thing to do. Sort of a micro-lobotomy.
Ben in DC
"It's the mark of an educated mind to be moved by statistics" Oscar Wilde
I would probably enjoy this movie more without knowing this. (aka, thanks for the spoilers jerkfaces)
http://www.somethingpositive.net Funny + bitter = comedy gold
Please for God's sake people, DO NOT CLICK ON THAT LINK! I was barfing for an hour afterword. We have a new rival to goatse.cx here, folks.
Doctors think in a different way: do whatever is necessary, and whatever you can, to keep the patient alive and as healthy as possible
I would say that most of my colleagues have disease as their focal point, not the patient. The patient is just a battlefield where the disease and the doctor fights the war.
You would be surprised how many people actually come out of surgery thinking that the operation was successful even though the patient died.
Just have a bottle of Vodka with a decent meal. And there you go, no recollection of the entire evening. If you can hold the liquor, you'll get an added bonus - no puking.
Philip K. Dick was writing from personal experience of electroshock therapy for manic-depression symptoms related to his bouts of schizophrenia. His upside experience often involved religious ecstasy, complete with hearing the voice of God, as described in his novel "Valis." Currently, anti-psychotics are prescribed to control the symptoms, but with significant side-effects.
Electroshock therapy is reported to cause loss of short term memory. Also, consider the short-term memory problems related with the "date-rape" drug Rohypnol(TM), generically called flunitrazepam.
"Total Recall", "Screamers", "Minority Report" are all reflections of Dick's experience with clinical psychiatric care in the 60's and 70's. "Paycheck" is yet another Hollywood variation on the theme. Add to this, William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" and culture watchers see a pattern of self-examination by Hollywood creatives as to the side-effects of fictional retellings of history. Consider Ronald Reagan's confusion of his role in "Murder in the Air" (1940) and its Inertia Projector - with the Space Defence Initiative and Dr. Edward Teller's space-based, nuclear-initiated, Gamma-Ray lasers.
Add to this Alzheimer's protein placques and the original question is completely moot. Memory erasure technology exists: The real challenge involves developing selective finesse and an understanding of the mechanism for reversing memory loss. That there are two memory mechanisms, short-term and long-term, is not in dispute. Short-term provides specificity and details, while long-term memory is of a holistic and probabilistic nature. Loss of short-term memory is often experienced by amnesia patients, who often find that they can rely on their long-term memory to recognize objects and execute previously learned behaviors, such as speech.
Current work on designing nano-particles to attack cancerous tumors by blocking blood vessels has potential application for providing selective destruction of regions of the brain that involve memory (the hippocampus) and cognition (temporal lobes).
DarkStarZumaBeachSurfinApocalypseWow
Really nice writing. Just one thing that strikes me as flawed.
(2) Even without understanding something, we can manipulate it in such a way as to achieve the desired affect.
The problem is that neither me, you nor anybody else have so far been able to reliably predict the effect of treatment in a specific patient. Sure there are statistics, but that does not help predicting reactions in each specific case. Maybe you should say
(2) Even without understanding something, we can manipulate it and hope we achieve the desired affect.
I agree that medicine is not science, but an art. The problem is that most doctors view themselves as scientists.
The brain is just too vast & complex for such a trivial approach. You need to use something subtle and powerful to manipulate the mind, like advertising or religion.
NOW I KNOW! That's why I do everything my girlfriend says. If I don't do what she wants I won't get laid.
"by having individual neurons zapped"?
...which outlines Hebbian dynamic neural assembly quite well.
No way. Memories, as cohesive collections of recollection across time, are not stored. They are re-created as called for. What is stored are very primitive primary details. Just enough of these as are necessary to re-create a memory are called up and associations formed between them. The brain fills in anywhere from some to damn near all of the in-between. This function, called "gestalt" is even more important for memory re-creation that it is for perception, and even there it does a majority of the work. If this sounds error prone, it is. You've got one, and this is how it works. I'm sure you've noticed a few inaccuracies in your memories from time to time.
As for individual neurons, not just no, but hell no. That idea was lost when Donald O Hebb taught us in 1949 that its collections of neurons acting as a network that perform functions. He also taught us that the same neuron can participate in a large number of different networks, according to which sets of connections are held active and which are suppressed.
As obtuse (79208) wrote in "No Grandmother Cell":
> But the current view is that memory is
> highly distributed. If you use a neural
> net as a trivial model of how the brain
> might work, you will realize that for a
> large and complex neural net with diverse
> purposes, there isn't a single cell devoted
> to anything. All the information is contained
> in the strength connections between cells.
> Karl Pribram used the phrase "holographic
> brain." The image on a hologram is
> distributed, so if you break it in two,
> you have two complete images, although each
> is less detailed. If you scratch a hologram,
> you don't lose part of the image, you lose
> detail overall.
Pribram later amended his theory and called the "holonomic". He was disturbed that people were claiming he said that memory was truly a hologram (and he got even more upset of extension of that mistake to consciousness and then the universe). What he did say (in his book Brain and Perception, 1991, Lawrence Erlbuam, ISBN: 0898599954) that Dennis Gabor's mathematics that he devised to describe holography (which won him the 1970 Nobel) could be used to describe the dynamic electrical field that builds up in the cortex and interacts with all local neurons, even those not directly connected, and affects their functioning as the field changes on very short orders of time.
However, the concept still has some explanatory merit. As Sherrington and then Lashley showed in those cortex ablation experiments referenced in most intro psych books, memories are any "place", but rather distributed across area, and even that area is not hard and fast. Removing large areas of cortex, up to as much as 90%, does not remove memories, but does make them less precise, i.e. they lose resolution. In this sense, the holographic metaphor works, although technically inaccurate.
A web site that presents his theory in a way I doubt he'd have much trouble with is at http://www.acsa2000.net/bcngroup/jponkp/ although this is by someone else, and not "sanctioned".
Anyone interested in the details of the theory are invited to examine the last quarter of his book, the appendices thereof. These were written with Basil Hiley (mathematical physicist and previously partner to David Bohm) and a couple of Japanese scientists, Mari Jibu and Kunio Yasue. Here you can see the application of Gabor's work as well as Schroedinger's in attempt to describe the cortical electric field.
To read and understand the entire book takes, in my opinion, a neuroscientist, a physicist and an engineer. And I had two years studying under Karl. I still get stuck in places, being only the first of those three. FWIW, my "scientific pedigree" is, in a direct line of descent of mentors to student, Sherrington, Lashley, Pribram and me.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I seem to remember from some soc. class this experiment where they took a rabbit and would play a tone and then blow air in the rabbits eye, and eventually it would learn to close its eye at the tone. Then they would cut that part of the brain out and the rabbit wouldn't remember to blink at the tone any more, but eventually it would relearn and then they could cut that new part of the brain out and it would keep re learning...
So, I imagine if you could some how monitor the brain and see where the memorys were being stored while the person was storing the information that you could cut those bits out and the person would forget.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
You're hinting at what's called encoding specificity (e.g. state-dependant learning/recall, the spacing effect, etc.) and it works because there are increased numbers of retreival cues. It isn't that the brain creates new paths out of nowhere. Rather, it's that there are large numbers of possible retreival cues (things in the environment, certain words, a certain sequence of events, etc.), so 'disrupting' one 'path' would do very little to the actual memory. Any erasure technique would necessarily need to avoid disrupting such cues, as they are undoubtedly associated with other memories. Otherwise, you might as well just use a shotgun as the erasure method.
Interestingly enough, as a counter to the person who brought up procrastinators/crammers as possibly having the 'right idea' due to the suggestion that emotion-driven memories are stronger, the spacing effect (i.e. studying periodically and not cramming all the night before) is thought to work mainly because of the larger number of retreival cues introduced.
i think the brains kinda holografic but
...
i think you can "erase" some bad memeory
by thinking about this experience and getting
really really drunk.
since the part of the brain that is involved
with this memory is more active when you
"think" this memeory, getting drunk will bring
more blood/alcohol to this part and kill few/
many cells in that part.
so yes! in part we can selectively destroy
unwanted memory
--Do you suffer from long-term memory loss?
n es ia.htm
http://www.animelyrics.com/dance/chumbawamba/am
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Infinite minus one.
The brain just doesn't work that way. The "storing" of information in the brain is an emergent property that comes from a vast array of correlated neuron activations.
Think of a massive Hebb-rule neural net.
So how do we "forget" things?
Well, as in a neural net, old patterns, if not reinforced, are slowly lost as the "writing" of new patterns degrades them. But every time we think about something, it reinforces that pattern.
So how can these patterns be directly and quickly erased?
They can't. You'd have to be able to identify all the minute changes in neuron co-activation that represented *this* particular memeory and no other, and directly (physically) reverse them.
This would require a technology so advanced that it would be indistinguishable from magic.
NOTICE: This notice will appear at the bottom of all my slashdot posts.
I'd use to erase the time I slept with this really ugly fat chick.....urgh!
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
The Men in Black have had this technology for years now!
Sindri Traustason.
ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) can be used to remove *much more* than the last 5 minutes of memory. During the procedure, high voltage and high current (much more than would be enough to kill if sent through the heart) are still commonly used to treat certain people who are described as being mentally ill.
The first shock removes the latest-formed memories. Further shocks remove memories in reverse order to when they were formed.
After prolonged treatment, the patient is often happier, but often mentally and/or physically disabled to some extent due to the treatment itself.
For those who won't accept drug therapy, or who deny their illness but need treatment anyway, ECT is a convenient method of treatment. The shocks are repeatedly delivered until the patient has improved enough to be sent home. If more treatment is needed later, the patient may be administered a memory-blocking sedative at their location (often by a family member) and then transported for followup ECT. Neighbors, coworkers, etc. may be instructed not to speak of it to the patient.
People who undergo ECT treatments make poor complainants. They don't usually remember the treatment, and may not believe they have received it if they were informed of it. Often, the patient is not informed of the treatment because doing so could result in a relapse.
Obviously the procedure can be abused to simply remove memories from anyone, including those who are considered healthy.
One thing about ECT that should be of interest to everyone:
You don't necessarily know if you have received it.
One source of information: http://www.ect.org
Search ECT memory loss for more.
There is a movie scripting package (or two) that gives you the organizing tools to do this. I've found that a bunch of 3x5 cards carried in my pocket does it quite well. Then use a posterboard and some pins to organize it.
There is also these little recorders that sell for less than $100 that can record stuff into folders for use later. Or even the Palm Pilots that can record stuff.
The key is to record whatever thoughts you have immediately! Otherwise you end up forgetting it and it drives you nuts trying to recapture the idea or dialog. Been there and done that too many times.
...The new Battlestar Galatica series summed up in one line.
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What Larry Squire at UC San Diego has shown is that if human subjects are repeatedly given electro-convulsive shocks (several times a week for several weeks), they will have impaired global memory that goes back many months, but that memory will gradually recover. He did this in the late 1980s.
Man... who signed up for that study and how much did they get paid? Or, much more likely, did they get extra time off their sentence for "good behavior"?
Casual Games/Downloads
I've seen a lot of people asking and answering questions regarding the brain and its function, and most of them tend to believe that the brain is a biological computer, and behaves according to a closed set of rules.
I take issue with this, both for metaphysical and logical reasons.
I start with the premise of free will. I will not attempt to demonstrate my free will to you, since that is, as far as I can tell, impossible, just as it is for you to demonstrate your free will to me. Nevertheless, we are (mostly) willing to accept free will as a reasonable posit.
Now consider: If one truly has free will, then one would be able to choose differently in identical situations, correct? Let's extend that to its idealized limit: Even if every particle in the universe were in the same location with the same velocity and charges (ie, even if you could completely replicate a situation in every way, right down to the chemical levels in your brain), if you have free will, you should be able to choose differently.
Now consider: The laws of physics are reliable. Two atoms of hydrogen plus one atom of oxygen never suddenly and unexpectedly combines to make peanut butter. Unless some unusual circumstance is affecting it, it combines to make water, and even if there is an unusual circumstance, once it's effect is known, it can be reliably predicted.
Your brain is made of matter. It is subject to the laws of physics. The electrical signals and chemical reactions in it behave in predictable ways. If your conciousness resides entirely within your brain, you cannot have free will. Therefore, if you have free will, part of your conciousness must come from something other than your brain, and must come from a nonphysical source.
I'll leave it to you to reason out that source.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
> there would be physical evidence that a procedure like that had been performed
It's called 'hangover', and is the first symptom to check when you wake up next to someone you don't know.
I'd pay big money to be able to erase large sections of my memories from graduate school...
Zapping individual neurons won't get you anywhere. (Well, not anywhere useful.)
The idea that specific thoughts (or even specific types of thought) are tied to
specific neurons (or even specific portions of the cerebrum) has been rather
thoroughly debunked. Just about the only thing we do know about the higher
levels of how the brain works is that it _doesn't_ divide work up by physical
area. Anything you think about, neurons all over your whole brain are involved
with it. Beyond that, we're not really sure yet how it works.
We do understand the low levels of how signals are passed from one neuron to
another, chemically. But how all that adds up to thought, we don't know yet.
If you take an introductory-level psych course, you'll learn about various
major theories of past psychologists about how the brain works. Most of them,
up until about the middle of the twentieth century, believed that different
areas of the brain are responsible for different types of thought and that
individual memories are stored in separate locations. This was the prevailing
view, because it seems obvious -- but you'll also learn about the various events
(most of them involving accidents of some kind, like the guy who got a metal
rod shot into his head and lived, brain tumors, et cetera) that lead gradually
toward a near-universal rejection of those ideas. To all appearances, the
brain does NOT work that way, despite what many scientists used to think.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
You see, the movie is what we call Fiction.
In SciAm's Jan04 they note the proposal of one researcher, that (orderly) prions would be ideal for memory storage. Prions are proteins (opposed to neurons/cells) which fold in a particular way, and are present in large amounts in every brain. Their storage could be controlled, readable, and permanent. In fact he's studying them for computer memory.
So perhaps short-term in the hippocampus, maybe by neural charge, which sometimes is then (intentionally) transmitted to the cortex for long-term storage by prions. If so, surely most long-term memory problems are in access and retrieval --since that's much harder-- rather than storage failure. My brother comes to mind as an example...
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow) happens when rogue prions arrive, and touch other proteins, causing them to fold and turn into rogues as well, spreading exponentially. Prions aren't destroyed by cooking BTW, like virii and bacteria are. (um...)
The ruling Party says, "... the brain and spinal cord of the Washington dairy cow had been removed and mad cow disease is not known to be transmitted from the muscle cuts of meat."
Hm, this is the closest they'll ever come to saying, DON'T BUY HOT DOGS, SAUSAGE, HAMBURGER, BOLOGNA, PEPPERONI, because they -do- have brains, ovaries, eyeballs, dicks, tails, etc, etc, in them!! Nevertheless, muscle contains blood, which will carry prions.
The Industry's reaction:
"Seeking to head off repercussions, U.S. cattlemen said slaughter houses should hold the carcasses of cattle that are too sick to walk until mad cow test results come back."
LOL, I can only laff, but to cry...
"Bush administration officials again emphasized that the beef supply is safe for consumers. President Bush continues to eat beef, a White House spokesman said."
Beef from where? Europe? I'm a native Texan, and when he was governor, he had just signed the concealed weapons carry bill; a reporter asked him if someone could bring a concealed handgun into the governor's mansion, and he said "Well hell, no."
{offtopic} it's a happy accident that cooking meat breaks up its internal structure, and modifies it in a way that's nice to eat. Physical laws could have just as easily turned meat when cooked, into a rubbery gelatious mass. Would have been a real problem for cavemen.{/offtopic}
I say, that since every brain is different, the only way to selectively erase memory (whatever its mechanism) is to harness the brain itself to do it somehow, as only it knows its particular architecture. You know, like reversing: infiltrator using a CPU to provide its own memory structure.
Favorite Paycheck quote: "It concerns optics..." "Err, doy, what are ya tryin' ta see? (slobber)"
[Sigh], another one of my posts languishes at the bottom. (and hm, CSS not spoken here?)
Campaign finance reform is national security.
I'm sure it is, but it perpetuates one of the most common misperceptions about holograms. That is, every piece of a hologram contains an image of the whole. It doesn't.
I don't know the name or author either.
But at least you weren't hallucinating. Unless you're hallucinating this, too...
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
I'm not a psychologist but I have taken coursework in the physical psychology so feel free to take this with a grain of salt.
While fractals and holographs sound very sexy, I don't know of any work done to prove this model of memory. I don't even know if we have the capability to detect this. If you do know of any research done is this vein, please, post some links. I'd be interested.
That said, the holographic/fractal model of memory does sound right to me and elegant to boot. One thing to remember though, the mind is often modeled after whatever the current sexy technology is. Freud thought the mind was analogous to a steam engine. Fractals are cool now so fractals it is. A greater understanding of string theory could yield a model that relies on quantum events. Who knows?
I think we're always getting closer to a true understanding of the mind but you should be careful when saying "the mind is build like this" or "memory is stored that way". The brain is poorly understood and psychology is a science in its infancy.
Blaze a trail to the New World
I don't think that this would be possible, at least for a very long time, because I believe that memories are stored holographically.
In the book, The Holographic Universe, one of the things it explains is how memory might be holographic, which would explain how people who loose big chunks of their brains are able to recover.
Free your ecomony and enact the FairTax
obviously bogus.
if you haven't seen the movie, Ben Affleck is a lady killing GQ wearing engineer. No such thing. Anyone with these characteristics goes immediately into sales.
A drug called Versed used in anesthesia. I've seen people freak out becuse of an allergic reaction to anesthetic drug, then given this drug so they had no memory of the freak out. http://www.rocheusa.com/products/versed/pi_iv.pdf
And it was alright.
;)
Now, there's two technologies involved in the movie. One is the neuron zapping which wouldn't work in real life. But there's another technology, which could work, but not as we're supposed to believe it does in the movie.
Before taking The Big Job in the movie, the hero gets injected with a toxin, which is used as a marker. At the end of his job, he gets injected another toxin, and he forgets everything. We're not explained how it works, but based on what we saw earlier, it must do pretty much the same thing as the neuron zapping.
Now that got me thinking, let's use what little we know about how memories work. The toxin goes into the brain and taints the cellular tissue. It doesn't hinder it. Now, let's say this chemical locks on particular brain cells, brain cells we've identified through research as being the ones that are involved in memory and that are scatered all over the brain. (maybe you'd have to tailor a toxin for each subject based on DNA, as brains are not configured exactly alike) Now, let's say that this particular toxin is altered when a connection is made between several synapses to form a memory.
Then take the other toxin. That toxin's job is to wipe the unaltered chemical from the brain and sever the connections on the flagged synapses.
Voila! Memory erased. Now, maybe such a substance doesn't exist right now, but these kind of movies relies on us believing that it might someday. I think it's a better theory than what's involved in the story.
Now can someone destroy my theory?
If you hit someone on the head hard enough, they forget stuff
I'm surprised that this hasn't come up -- but how do we know it isn't already happening?
Think about it.
The grand old dame of science journalism is turning into just as much of a rag as Discover and PopSci are, and Omni used to be. How much do you think they are getting from the producers of Paycheck for this little product-placement whorefest? What's next, some 'scientist' discussing the possibilities of mansions actually being haunted? Come on folks, give us some real science. Explain why Ben Affleck get's paid so much to do something he's so obviously bad at. Tell us why Jaylo has such a big booty, and why I like it so much. THAT's Science!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I've yet to make it somewhere to read the original story (and I didn't like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which makes me slightly less likely to do it in the near future), but the huge, glaring security holes were the worst thing about the movie.
SPOILERS: Why on Earth would the security department for a paranoid/evil company (a) let him send himself an access swipe card and (b) leave him in the system? I might have somewhat liked the movie, if it weren't for this one horrible plot hole.