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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?'"
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.
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!
I don't remember, you insensitive clod.
But if you found out that you'd had your memory erased, they'd just erase it again!
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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.
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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
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.
*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".
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.)
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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.
Actually, memories are formed from consolidations of neuronal connections most likely in a somewhat regionally loosely distributed fashion. Think of it as distributed storage of files on particular subnetworks. Of course we neuroscientists do not really know exactly how this is done or even how specific thoughts are encoded. But it is thought by some/many camps that consciousness and memories are an emergent phenomenon that arises out of networks of neuronal connections. The two categories can also be subdivided into consciousness and two forms of memory, long term and short term. (Of course there are those who believe that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts but....this is science we are talking about). Disruptions of memory are often due to strategic loss of connections in particular portions of cortex, thus pathology becomes critically informative in the study of memory and consciousness.
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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!
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.
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.
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.