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Scientists Have Discovered How To 'Delete' Unwanted Memories (telegraph.co.uk)
A new documentary from PBS reveals how cutting edge science enables us to 'edit' memories and create new ones from scratch. "For much of human history, memory has been seen as a tape recorder that faithfully registers information and replays it intact," say the film's makers. "But now, researchers are discovering that memory is far more malleable, always being written and rewritten, not just by us but by others. We are discovering the precise mechanisms that can explain and even control our memories."
My understanding is that when a person remembers something, the record of that memory is destroyed and then rewritten in the brain. However, there is at least one drug that can prevent the creation of memories in the brain. It's always seemed logical that, under the influence of such a drug, accessing a memory should also cause that memory to effectively be erased.
A politician or CEO has his own memory of crooked deals, wiped.
Rape victims or pedophile victims get their memories of their abuse and torture, wiped.
Leaving aside the amount of technology required, there will be a large black market for this. It may create an industry of deleting every unpleasant memory, leaving only the memories of adulation, success and narcissism. Will that have long-term consequences? Memories were deleted in the movie Frozen (2013) without consequence. In ST: TOS, Kirk claims the pain provided by our memories define a lot of our behaviours. With that pain gone, will a person commit those mistakes again?
Mod this up. Any lawyer will have had this in their first class on witnesses. Memories are known to be very unreliable.
Years ago, I taught myself hypnosis, based on reading a book about it. One thing that struck me in that book was the statement that on a subconscious level, our brain cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy. It is only our consciousness (the linear reasoning part) that filters the fantasy bits and supplies appropriate metadata. As any beginner hyptnotist will learn, consciousness is off much more often than we realize.
From my own experiments, erasing someones memory of something while they are under is one of the best working mechanisms that become available to the hypnotist. When I told folks to forget my name and planted a different name in its place, the information persisted even past the session. I had to show my ID to convince the person that their memory of my name has been manipulated.
The ethical implications of this mechanism are obvious. In fact, I haven't been able to proceed in my "studies" of the phenomenon precisely because I wasn't able to deal with using the mechanism without the subject's knowledge.