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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.
I don't remember, you insensitive clod.
...winning a Nobel Prize than science is to understanding memory, let alone erasing it.
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.
...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."
You've hit upon the fundamental difference between scientists and doctors here - which, incidentally, is why most people of either profession refuse to take the other seriously. Scientists think the way you do: if something's going wrong and you don't understand what's happening, then figure it out before you do anything that could screw things up even worse. Doctors think in a different way: do whatever is necessary, and whatever you can, to keep the patient alive and as healthy as possible; it doesn't matter if you understand how the treatment works or not (for example, we have no idea how most drugs have their effect, which is a large part of the reason why drug development is so expensive and time-consuming and requires clinical trials). The difference stems from the fact that scientists want to understand (or at least predict) the behavior of the universe, whereas doctors want to keep people alive.
To bring this back to the discussion at hand, there are two competing theories of how our minds work. In the first, we have specific cells devoted to specific memories - e.g., you have a "grandmother cell" that remembers your grandmother, and if that cell were to die, you'd lose the memory. In the second, our brain is a state machine, so the memory of you grandmother is spread throughout the activity of the entire brain. There's evidence to support both ideas, which suggests that the truth is somewhere in the middle. From the standpoint of believable movie science, do we understand enough about the brain to be able to erase someone's memory precisely, accurately, and repeatably, knowing exactly what we're doing? No. That's the scientist's point of view. Do we have enough tools at our command to be able to erase part of someone's memory if it were really, really important and we had plenty of time and money to spend on the problem? Maybe. That's the doctor's point of view (not that a doctor would do this necessarily, but it illustrates the solve-a-practical-problem vs. understand-the-fundamental-principles mentality that separates the two cultures).
(and, once again, five mod points go unused.)
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.