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Drug Selectively Removes Rats' Memory
rednuhter writes "Nature online is reporting scientists have used drugs to selectively remove one memory while not affecting another.
Musical tones were played to the rats and at the same time the subjects were given a mild electric shock. Half the study group were given the drug (not approved for use in humans) and then the experiment was repeated with a new tone. The following day the rats that had not been given the treatment were afraid of both tones while the treated half were only afraid of the second tone: the memory of fear of the first had been erased."
Are they sure the reason is so clearcut and simple?
We took the entire study group and displayed both Tubgirl and Goatse to them, this made them all extremely nervous.
We then took one half of the group and after injecting them with a drug (not approved for humans yet) and once again shown them goatse.
The next day when we displayed goatse on the projector, only half the group were nervous.
Hypothosis 1: The drug made them forget.
Hypothosis 2: The repeated viewings made them immune to the shock (O RLY?)
Hypothosis 3: They were still drugged up from yesterday to care about the shock.
Hypothosis 4: The drug gave them super powers. Electricity makes them stronger.
I, for one, hail our super electricity feeding super rat overlords.
liqbase
This opens up some possibilities for treatment of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Drugging all troops before combat will be much less expensive than paying for PTSD treatment. What a Brave New World this opens up.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
The scientists have concluded that this new drug, tentatively named Rohypnol, shows great promise for "all kinds of treatments".
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Cool... it might open up a new way for some of us to make a paycheck.
"Damn it, Bones, you're a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away! I.. need.. my pain!"
...crap, I'm quoting "Star Trek V." It must be Monday morning.
The objective results are pretty inarguable, but the implication that the reason that the rats didn't fear the note they heard while drugged is that they had completely forgotten about it seems tenuous. The rats could just as easily become accustomed to the note, develop a different association with that note (like being drugged), or become unafraid of it for some other related reason.
The article supports the claim by saying the brain activity is different, but it seems that more complicated experiments would need to be done before it could really be claimed that memories could be wiped this way.
A drug that selectively erases memories would be very oopen to misuse. I believe we should immediately institute proper measures to prevent our police, governments, and military forces from..
....what was I saying?
..what's that? A glass of orange juice? My favorite! Thank you, that's very kind.
Now then.. *gulp*
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
According to the latest research, the rat memory was selectively *silenced*!
I mean, I dont remember seeing any more post before this one...maybe i need some more of that drug....what was I doing? Oh yeah, first post! Now where is my chee....First post!
Your Honor, the prosecution keeps saying I killed this man for money but I have no recollection of this nor any recollection of agreeing to do this so I can not possibly plead guilty which is my legal right. Thus I can't get a fair trial. I move to dismiss.s -selling-solar.html
--
Innocent power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Only for those with the drug. And, tellingly, they were immune to the first tone and not the second (repeated, but different) tone.
They still responded to the second tone (post-drug) that was paired with the shock.
Very limited super powers, as they still responded to the second tone. I know this is /. but you could at least read the summary completely. ;)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
It's called vodka.
"I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability."-Oscar Wilde
First, according to article, the rats were first "trained" to fear both tones. Thus, you don't have to administer the drug before the stimulus has been conditioned to produce a fear response and you don't have to administer the drug during the fear conditioning. Therefore, this is not a proactive treatment, but a retroactive one. You would not use this drug to train a ruthless, emotionless army. The article says nothing about the drug preventing or blocking the future association of neutral stimuli with a fear response provoked by a stressful stimuli.
Second, the drug is administered and then the "conditioned" stimuli is introduced while the subjects are under the influence of the drug. Later when the drugged subjects were tested, they showed no fear response for the stimuli they rehearsed while drugged. And the fear response was only removed for the stimuli that was introduced during the drugging, leaving other conditioned responses intact.
Now, as is often the case with news articles on research, the article's claim is misleading. This research does not actually imply that you can selectively remove a fearful memory. The research design only targetted conditioned, associative responses, which are a subset of the larger category of memories. There is memory for the event in itself and there is memory for associating the event as the cause of some unpleasant effect. But all the research shows is that the the link between the conditioned stimuli and the fear response has been broken. There may still be "episodic" memory for the original stimuli and the unpleasant. Unfortunately, we cannot interview the rats and ask them if they remember the details of their conditioning prior to the drugging.
On to humans... if the drug does not remove the "episodic" memory of the "traumatic" stimulus, it might not be all that advantageous to remove the "fear" response in the first place. Imagine what it might be like to feel NOTHING when you are recalling a mortar round tearing your friend into pieces beside you. That might be a lot more sinister than feeling stressed. But what you do in the case of PTSD is administer the drug and then play sounds like cars back firing, ballons popping, and etc. That way you help the patient to unlearn the "stress response" for neutral, non-related stimuli without affecting the original memory and association.
If the "drug not available to humans" erased ALL memories prior to its use, the rats might also still have the same results regarding the two tones.
Argh. Bad bad interpretation of results. The drug didn't selectively delete that memory. The drug did the exact same thing that many current drugs do, inhibit normal activity in the hypocampus (storage of short term memory, before processing into long term memory). These drugs are already in common use. If you are an old fart like me with a family history of colon cancer, you will be familiar with it. When getting a colonoscopy they give it to you so that you can stay awake during the procedure and move or do as needed, but you will not remember the pain of the procedure itself. When the drug wears off, you suddenly are 'awake'. You weren't asleep before, but you weren't recording memories during that time, so it seems to you like you just woke up and stated remembering things from that time forward.
So describing it as selectively deleting memories is very very misleading.
I remember, or perhaps I don't, hmmm, a post sometime back, I think, that a /. poster mentioned something about, "And the RIAA now charges per memory of a song, as it is only licensed to be heard once. Soon, memory altering methods will be used to erase the song from persons memory who do not continue to pay the licensing fees."
But then I could be wrong.
Oh, come one! You knew someone was going to make the RIAA connection!
Later.
... there is nothing that has not already been thought
Sounds like an old Orson Scott Card story - scientist testing a drug on rats finds it wipes memory. Using that they determine how memory is stored and manage to record it. Now they can upload a rat mind into a different rat. Hey, let's see if that works for people! A little bit later cloning becomes easy, and now it's a torture tool - if we record his memory while we kill him and then upload into a new body, did he really die?
...soudns more like they are preventing or reversing only recently formed memories. If you taught them two things on that day - fear the first tone but the buzz noise gives you pleasure, then after being drugged, they would lose both memories i.e. all new things learnt on that day would be erased.
:-)
OK, now to go and read the article to see if they tested for this...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
A cure for the goatese problem...
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Mind you, the drug is called "booze" and you don't do the selecting, it does. It tends to erase things like why it was a good idea to leave the bar with that hyena-creature, or why you were dancing with it in the first place.
This is not my sandwich.
There's already a drug fer dat. It's called, uh, "concrete boots". Yeah. Dat's de ticket. Concrete boots. F'getabout it. -- Vinny
Actually, this pill isn't just used for rats. I am also participating in a test of this drug. In fact, I am about to take my next dose soon.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
See this link I've experienced this MANY times before
This applies to the majority of both my degrees
:-]
Jaj
Actually, this pill isn't just used for rats. I am also participating in a test of this drug. In fact, I am about to take my next dose soon!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
It simply stopped it from going into long term memory.
Actually, this pill isn't just used for rats. I'm also participating in a test of this drug. In fact, I am about to take my next dose soon.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
... to the age-old question: "What would a movie that combined 'The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' and 'Ben' be like?" Or perhaps it's "The Secret of Nim" meets "Fifty First Dates". Or even "Flowers for Algernon" crossed with "Memento". I, for one, welcome our new amnesiac rodent overlords.
How soon will Star Trek's "Dagger of the Mind" become a reality.
Pair it up with "Minority Report" tech for some real fun: Preemptive Erasing.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Take that Pinky and the Brain!
PTSD is somewhat more complex than just Pavlovian knee-jerk responses to certain stimuli. Judging by the hormones produced, for example, it seems that PTSD is basically being stuck in trying to learn how one should have dealt with an extreme situation where there was really no sane way of dealing with it. The re-living it over and over again is basically just a (screwed up) way of trying to learn how that could have been avoided, except there is nothing to learn, so it never stops.
At any rate, those noises and whatnot are not stressful as such. There is no Pavlovian connection that causes some unthinking reaction when a balloon pops. What happens is that it reminds you of that mortar round that tore your friend to pieces, and the whole "OMG, what should I have done" simulation starts all over again.
So unless you make them either forget that original memory, or somehow become desensitized to it, you haven't achieved much.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...for this new drug to be called "Gleemonex". And it should be orange in colour, nevermind the fact that it's actually pale blue in it's native synthesized form :P
:)
Go watch "Brain Candy", it'll be good for you
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
-Possum Lodge Motto
I read this story earlier and had a very insightful comment thought up I was going to post, but now I can't seem to remember it...
"Drug" is defined by the FDA as "any substance advertised to cure a disease."
Don't you think it's about time they were returned to a more productive task than the one they are experimenting on now, and especially to not be so cruel to the little creatures? Men are much more reasonable test tubjects than are animals, that's why a Veterinarian trains for twice the length of time at a university because animals require better interpretation on their symptoms while men can talk about the pain all they want.
This alleged "drug" stinks of influence of a continuing project of the CIA, no different than the experiments of LSD continued to the poor generics in the medical industry. None would volunteer for LSD if they actually knew what it was intended to accomplish at the time. Why is it any different now? It isn't morality to decide what is good or bad research; it is respectful that such physical experimentation is not done when the outcome is well known. Besides, looking to PRISONPLANET.COM, it looks like "drugs" as this have been an experiment on Prisoners of War held at Guantanamo Bay facilities of the U.S. Navy/Army as well as the numerous detention centers and prison compounds of the US Navy/Army built on Iraq soil to seize and experiment on harmless and non-accused "suspects" with no evidence.
And yet here we are, speaking more respectively of the rats while men (male and female, children or grown) are stolen from the streets by military for tests and then pumped and dumped like a penny-stock.
without prejudice
I selectively forget how many beers I have had after 3, or 4, or is it 5? Well, I think I'll have another beer....
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+