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?'"

Comments

I have proof it exists

[cluge]

Slashdot editors have had this happen to them! That is why they we have repeat stories, sometimes one right after the other!

Re:I have proof it exists

[thinkliberty]

They are beta-testing a non-subscriber method of slashdot... If you don't pay, you don't get to remember what you read on the site after you leave.

It only leaves you with this funny feeling that you like what is on the sitte, obviously there are still bugs in the system, and that is why there are repeat stories!

Re:I have proof it exists

[crapulent]

Slashdot editors have had this happen to them! That is why they we have repeat stories, sometimes one right after the other!

"Is this possible?"

[infornogr]

I don't remember, you insensitive clod.

Re:Evidence

[anotherone]

But if you found out that you'd had your memory erased, they'd just erase it again!

Movie based on social implications

[Lord_Dweomer]

A new movie is coming out that deals with some of the social implications about the ability to do this.

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.

Un Nerving

[Alien54]

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.

Notice how these types keep saying that this stuff is good for you ....

Re:Un Nerving

[bomb_number_20]

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.

Re:Un Nerving

[Thurn und Taxis]

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.)

Current technologies available

[JFMulder]

who studies learning and memory, to explain what kinds of memory erasure are currently possible
What about the good old whack behind the head?

Ben Affleck is closer to...

[Anonymous Coward]

...winning a Nobel Prize than science is to understanding memory, let alone erasing it.

Re:Ben Affleck is closer to...

[smithmc]

I didn't know there was a Nobel Prize for Dry, Wooden Pseudo-Acting.

Re:What for?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Fractal memory

[DigiShaman]

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.

Memory erasure? No, but...

[argent]

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.

Congrats to Paycheck...

[Overly Critical Guy]

...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!"

Re:Philip K Dick

[twiddlingbits]

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.

Re:What for?

[zenyu]

So, you have proof that MS has been involved in "technology theft" then?
Either you're wrong in that they're successfully covering up after themselves, or you're wrong in that they're doing it. Either way, you're talking crap.

Woah there partner, you haven't been paying attention. Search your old Windows 3.1 executable for "Stacker"... or google. You might also want to look into some of the other settlements, like the one in France last year. A lot of them involved some very nasty unethical stuff, much of it under the category of theft. You could also buy some drinks for someone you know that worked for a company targeted for ruin by Microsoft, a few hours later you'll not want to partner with it ever again.

Re:Just what we need

[argent]

*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".

VERSED--sedative used e.g. for colonoscopies

[dpbsmith]

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.

No grandmother cell

[obtuse]

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.

Re:No grandmother cell

[Thurn und Taxis]

You're right, the grandmother-cell idea has been discredited (and fwiw, I don't believe it either). But so has the complete-distributed-processing idea (i.e., the holographic memory concept you mentioned). It's absolutely untrue that your entire brain is involved in each thing you brain does, just as it's absolutely untrue each brain function can be mapped to a single neuron - and that was exactly the point I was trying to make when I said:

There's evidence to support both ideas, which suggests that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

The "holographic brain" idea you mentioned is clearly untrue, because if you break the brain in two (e.g., cut the corpus callosum), you don't end up with two identical brains, each less detailed. You end up with two different brains, each containing some of the information stored in the other (for example, you pointed out indirectly that Broca's and Wernicke's areas are associated with different inputs and outputs). So the information in the brain isn't totally distributed. OTOH, cases such as your grandmother's, in which she was able to regain an ability she had lost, argue that brain abilities aren't totally localized.

I'm going to ignore your suggestion that advertising and religion are more powerful than science and medicine, because it ignores my other point - that you can manipulate something without really understanding it. But I think my two conclusions still stand:

(1) The brain uses both local and distributed processing, and we don't understand the nature and extent of either; and
(2) Even without understanding something, we can manipulate it in such a way as to achieve the desired affect.

Re:Philip K Dick

[Thurn und Taxis]

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,