Slashdot Mirror
Erasing Details Of Bad Memories
An anonymous reader writes "People can be trained to forget specific details associated with bad memories, according to breakthrough findings that may lead the way for the development of new depression and post-traumatic stress disorder therapies. New study (abstract), published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, reveals that individuals can be taught to forget personal feelings associated with an emotional memory without erasing the memory of the actual event."
During one of my dad's heart surgeries, they kept him semi-conscious with Versed. He curses the person running the anesthesia to this day for not giving him enough Versed since he remembers much of the procedure, including the doctors discussing how much energy to use to shock his heart out of fibrillation.
That said, I wonder if using too little Versed is sometimes the culprit in the PTSD type symptoms you're discussing (which my dad has, for that procedure and other reasons).