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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?'"
Never underestimate the power of brainwashing. Just look at the hunt for Saddam Hussein : despite 25M offered for his capture, it took month to track down someone who was willing to betray him.
Likewise with Microsoft : you're not likely to find a current or former employee admitting outright that they've "borrowed" other people's technologies.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
There is a lot of controversy surrounding this.
For certain types of mental illness, electro-convulsive therapy is still considered an acceptable form of treatment by some physicians. I think the voltage has been lowered a bit and the duration, frequency and method of zapping is more tightly controlled, but it is still used quite regularly and has been since at least the 60s- maybe earlier.
One of the side effects of this treatment is a temporary loss of short-term memory. Suuposedly, it eventually returns, but patients lose short-term memory of events leading up to the treatment.
Having seen this sort of thing first-hand, i find it disturbing that anyone could support it. The brain, for the most part, is uncharted territory; and the fact that, without really knowing anything about it, we are willing to pump juice through someones brain because it 'seems to help' is insane to me.
To me, the concept is similar to patching a for loop that isnt working right by screwing with the counter in the test. It may get things working- but it also has the potential to break a lot of other things. It's the wrong way to go about doing things.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
*snort*
I'm not a "low grade sci-fi writer", I'm so low class I'd have to improve to make no-class... and I hope I made that *perfectly* clear.
The point, mister anonymous, is that while the technology in "Paycheck" is vanishingly unlikely... the idea that we'd be able to untangle the changes in brain structure that represent specific memories and *reverse* them without changing anything else... well... it'd be easier to fix all the security holes in Windows armed with nothing but a bar magnet and a really good magnifying glass.
But I suspect we're not far from being able to induce things like temporary anterograde amnesia. If you could actually do useful work in that state it would make a heck of a security protocol. For some skills that would be enough: sightreading and playing a score may be possible, if a mob boss in hiding wants live entertainment. For others, well, you'd need to be able to replace long term memory with something external to the brain. How far off is that? I don't know, but I'll bet it's closer than "memory erasure".
You've hit upon the fundamental difference between scientists and doctors here - which, incidentally, is why most people of either profession refuse to take the other seriously. Scientists think the way you do: if something's going wrong and you don't understand what's happening, then figure it out before you do anything that could screw things up even worse. Doctors think in a different way: do whatever is necessary, and whatever you can, to keep the patient alive and as healthy as possible; it doesn't matter if you understand how the treatment works or not (for example, we have no idea how most drugs have their effect, which is a large part of the reason why drug development is so expensive and time-consuming and requires clinical trials). The difference stems from the fact that scientists want to understand (or at least predict) the behavior of the universe, whereas doctors want to keep people alive.
To bring this back to the discussion at hand, there are two competing theories of how our minds work. In the first, we have specific cells devoted to specific memories - e.g., you have a "grandmother cell" that remembers your grandmother, and if that cell were to die, you'd lose the memory. In the second, our brain is a state machine, so the memory of you grandmother is spread throughout the activity of the entire brain. There's evidence to support both ideas, which suggests that the truth is somewhere in the middle. From the standpoint of believable movie science, do we understand enough about the brain to be able to erase someone's memory precisely, accurately, and repeatably, knowing exactly what we're doing? No. That's the scientist's point of view. Do we have enough tools at our command to be able to erase part of someone's memory if it were really, really important and we had plenty of time and money to spend on the problem? Maybe. That's the doctor's point of view (not that a doctor would do this necessarily, but it illustrates the solve-a-practical-problem vs. understand-the-fundamental-principles mentality that separates the two cultures).
(and, once again, five mod points go unused.)
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.
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.