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Drug Deletes Fearful Memories
Al writes "Technology Review has an article about a common drug that seems to 'delete' painful memories related to a fearful experience. Experiments carried out by neuro-scientists at Emory University show that propranolol, a drug commonly used to treat high blood pressure, can suppress the emotional part of a fearful memory. The results, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest a new way to treat anxiety disorders. In recent years, scientists have discovered that the simple act of remembering a past experience requires that the memory be consolidated once again. And both animal research and some human studies have shown that during re consolidation, long-term memories — once thought to be fairly stable — can be more easily meddled with."
Now they can make money re-educating the same students they educated before! Think of the student loan debt!
propranolol
So this will turn your fearful memories into hilarious ones?
I've seen this story before. I think.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You speak as if our brain's software is without bugs. If you had seen the suffering and disablement that intense, often unreasonable, emotional pain can inflict on some people even years after the traumatic event, perhaps you would be less dismissive of an attempt to patch this particular bug.
Expose X people to a horrific event and a high percentage of them will show the ability to get over it. There is that outlying group, however, who (despite honest effort and therapy) seem to have an overactive emotional memory system which prevents them from ever coming to terms with what happened.
You're right, to an extent. Living without pain is very hard--some individuals born without the ability have hellish lives as a result. But sometimes, pain teaches us lessons that aren't so good, like "I should never touch anyone for the rest of my life," because touching is so strongly associated with pain. How people with this sort of thing varies from one individual to the next, but for someone with a deeply ingrained irrational fear based on some painful experience, maybe removing the memory could be a good thing.
Another way of looking at it is this: if you are raped, and the idea of sex is permanently distorted in your mind by the memory, then this memory is a punishment for something that isn't your fault, haunting you and messing up your life to this day. Wouldn't it be a good thing to allow the *option* of removing this weight from one's shoulders?
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, and now we have a drug for it."
QamuIs Heg qaq law' lorvIs yInqaq puS
On the other hand, previous experiences suggest this might not be such a bad thing. It didn't actually do much damage last year when a secret biowarfare lab accidentally released the Mnemonivirus and we had a global Amnesia Plague. Remember that?
Yes, but it's like a DELETE statement without a WHERE clause.
Table-ized A.I.
As I previously said, there is a group of people who, despite honest effort and therapy, do not recover from traumatic events. There is no support for a quick fix anywhere in my earlier comments. Stop attempting to straw-man this.
Bullshit. There are clearly innate and instinctual functions of our brain our higher processes wish they could override. We have an onion of a brain with layer upon layer of functionality, but also layer upon layer of cruft.
Flinching when you know the person isn't going to hit you. Accelerated heartbeat when you know it is only a movie. Goosebumps when you know you have no hair to fluff. Even the annoying sensation of cold when you know you are able to maintain core temperature. All of these are examples of where, despite conscious will, our base programming still rules.
You're assuming these people can learn. I'm arguing there is a class of case where normal brain function has been so disrupted by an overactive response to an emotional event that learning from the event is impossible. Despite your insistent wish to believe that isn't so.
Who says this is a one-size-fits-all solution? Not I. It appears to me that there is either a reading comprehension problem or a desire to straw-man again.
A non-functional personality can solve no problems. Either we do what we can to restore advanced functionality (and maybe this will prove an effective tool to do so) or we accept the person as a loss. Many really are just that far gone.
So this will turn your fearful memories into hilarious ones?
Just wait when it goes off-patent. You'll see knock-offs like propanorofl, propanolmao, propanolulz and propanocheezburgar.