Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
I don't remember, you insensitive clod.
I could have sworn I knew the answer to that question prior to my last job...
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
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!
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"
Watching american sitcoms works pretty well too.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
who studies learning and memory, to explain what kinds of memory erasure are currently possible
What about the good old whack behind the head?
...winning a Nobel Prize than science is to understanding memory, let alone erasing it.
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
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.
Actually most of the evidence points to (long-term) memory being "holographic" (no lasers, mathematically so) - it is spread out. Damaging a neuron or 1000 decreases the intensity of memories, but the memory as a whole is only very vaguely localised, like the way you can cut holes in holograms, and have the bit be "filled in" weakly by the surrounding undamaged hologram.
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.
Relax- this isn't the Crying Game.
Premise != plot twist.
The premise of the movie is no secret... how else do you expect to get audiences to go see it?
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
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.
I would!
Wow, I sure could use a cold frothy Coca Cola and a nice soothing RIAA approved album right now. I think I'll put my Nike's on and drive down to Wal-Mart in my Ford Explorer.
...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."
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.
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 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
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.
*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".
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
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;"
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."
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!
Heck, I was doing that in my early twenties with Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboys, orange microdots and Black Beauties.
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
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.
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!
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...
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
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.
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.
FWIW, Phillip K Dick has been the inspiration of many movies over the past 20 years or so. According to IMDB (since I don't trust my own memory), he's credited with the inspiration (since he died in '82) of (in chronological order):
"Out of This World" (1962), a TV series based on Impostor (a short story in which aliens who take the place of humans are convinced that they are in fact the humans whose places they took - the concept of identity, what it is, and how it can be determined is a common theme throughout his work).
"Blade Runner" (1982), a movie *very* loosely based on his novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". The common theme here is what makes one human - memories, a fragile body, the desire to live, or some other intangible thing (a soul)?
"Total Recall" (1990). Miserable adaptation of a clever idea by PKD. I won't describe the movie, which you've probably already seen, but I'll describe the original story which you probably haven't read (warning:spoilers - skip to the end of the paragraph). A young man pays for a "vacation" in which false memories of a trip as a secret agent to Mars are implanted. Except the company (Rekal, Inc) can't implant the memories, because the man really was a secret agent who went to Mars, but had his memories erased - trying to implant the new ones released the old ones. But he doesn't fully realize what happened, and the old memories haven't fully resurfaced, so he goes back to complain about their bad service. Well, the secret service discovers that he's starting to remember the memories they hid, so they capture him. They'd like to kill him, but as a last attempt to save this potentially-useful agent, they have a shrink examine his psyche for some fantasy that sits even deeper in his psyche than wanting to be a secret agent. They find this deep-seated wish-fulfillment fantasy where, as a child, he encounters an invading alien species of mice. Because of his kindness to them, the aliens agree not to invade Earth as long as he's alive. So they decide to implant this memory in place of the Mars-secret-agent one. Only they discover that it isn't a fantasy after all....
"Confessions of a Crap Artist" (1992). Haven't seen the movie, but according to the IMDB reviews it's a faithful adaptation of the novel of the same name. Not Sci-fi, but great novel nonetheless.
"Screamers" (1995). Again, haven't seen the movie. The story is about a war between robots and humans (Matrix, anyone?), in which the robots create human-like machines to prey on the sympathies of the humans. Once again, the question arises - who's really human, and who's a ticking time bomb?
"Impostor" (2002). See "Out of This World", above.
"Minority Report" (2002). Decent adaptation, except for the fact that they CHANGED THE WHOLE POINT OF THE STORY! (More spoilers) The story at it's heart was fatalistic- it introduced the "pre-crime" idea, in which people are arrested for crimes they are about to commit, regardless of whether they know they will commit them or not. Pre-crime is based on the thoughts of three 'precogs', who can predict the future- if two agree about a future activity, then the person responsible is investigated. The head of pre-crime, John Anderton in the movie (don't remember the name in the story), finds out that he's about to kill someone. He consults the "precogs" (people with pre-cognitive abilities to predict the future) and finds that two of the three think that he's going to kill someone who he doesn't know and has never met, a military leader. The military is upset because pre-crime is making them irrelevant, so they want to destroy its credibility. This leader has Anderton captured, and explains to him their plans for destroying pre-crime. Anderton wants to kill him, but doesn't, because he knows it will play into their hands (by discrediting the head of precrime, they can destroy it). So the military plans a press conference showing Anderton next to this military leader as a way of discrediting pre-crime,
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.
He'd be obsolete after his first job. He'd be the perpetual low-paid intern, fresh out of college, for his entire career.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
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.
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
Here it is edited a little :-) oops
.. 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"
:-)
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
Anyway had my rant for now, us Cognitive scientist types get touchy when people misrepresent how we think the brain works Cheers
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).
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.
"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
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'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