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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?'"
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.
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.
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Backup? I thought that was what the internet was for...
However, a person's mind isn't the only record of what you did. What about all those notes, emails, meetings, items procured from third parties etc? You work for a company and it's not just you that would need to be zapped. If you have enough partial evidence that you can stitch back together, you can figure out the rest, right?
(I guess this is what the movie is about, but I haven't seen it yet)
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...
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.
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.
To take that concept one more step read Kiln People by David Brin. You can make an infinite number of clones of yourself that each last a few hours to a few days, and if you wish you can download the memories the clone experiences during his/her "life". So if the clone does something illegal, the "owner" has no recollection of it if the clone dies before the memories are downloaded. Excellent book that deals with exactly this question, while disquised as a detective novel.
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
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.
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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!
Not all the films made of Phillip K Dick books were awful though. I don't know of many of them but I do know of one that was good.
Blade Runner was a very nice film, which as we know was based on the Book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", and for once I think it broke the tradition which states that the book is always better than the film. Not that the film was better. Just a different slant.
So all is not lost. Phillip K Dick can rest easy.
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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.
Although what I am about to quote is a review section for bad physics in a movie, I feel that info in it is related to this topic, more spcifically, the post above.
"The idea that an undifferentiated blank can pass through a type of puberty into a fully functioning individual in a matter of minutes ranks up there with the evil eye magic. There are reasons why regular puberty takes several years. Many of the mechanisms are sequential and are limited by diffusion processes which tend to be slow. We also estimate that making the conversion consumes energy at a rate of around 1 million joules (239 kcal, or about half a milkshake) per day in the form of food. Assuming normal puberty lasts 4 years, the total energy is about 1.5 billion joules. Confining puberty to a five minute time frame would require a power source of 5 million watts, the equivalent of about 4000 toasters. Magically, this poses no problem for the clones."
Gleaned from http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/6thday.html
As you can see, making a clone is no easy buisness. So although the idea is quite clever, its not a viable solution...
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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
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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.
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).
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You can erase about the last 5 minutes with various forms of treatment and trauma. This produces true retrograde amnesia, and is seen with electroconvulsive therapy.
This is probably because the memory is still stored in a short term electrical loop which can be disrupted before it is stored in some change in neural architecture.
Certain drugs produce antegrade amnesia (forward amnesia) including the benzodiazepines such as midazolam, and flunitrazepam (used as a "date rape" drug). You can actually look quite awake after taking these drugs, but not incorporate anything new into long term store. Although you live with a 5 minute memory span, its frightening how well people appear to function when they are like this, and can actually do fairly awake tasks. I don't think that they would be up to cracking hostile companies computer systems unless they really could function in their sleep, however.
Just for your information.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
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.
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