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Scientists Reveal How We Can Forget On Purpose
An anonymous reader writes: When people say, "Forget you heard that," they don't usually mean literally. But it turns out that you can stop yourself from remembering, at least on a small scale. People can intentionally forget memories by changing how they think about the context those memories were made in, scientists reported this week in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. In the experiment, people studied a random list of words while viewing pictures of landscapes such as beaches or forests. They were then instructed to either remember or forget those words. The scientists then used an fMRI to track brain activity related to the outdoor scenes they'd planted as context for the word memories. They saw that people who'd been ordered to forget thought less about the context. The better people were at wiping nature-related thoughts from their minds, the fewer words they could later recall from their list.
To me, "deliberately forgetting" and "not bothering to remember" are two slightly different things.
Might have been good to have a third group who weren't told to remember or forget.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Alcohol is simply self-medication with one of the cruder drugs available.
If you can't leave your upbringing behind you, the first thing you should consider is to see a professional about behavior modification, especially if you're constantly (obsessively) replaying the past in your mind. If simple talk therapy and exercises don't suffice, see a psychiatrist who can try prescribing something. Be prepared to discover 2 things, however: 1) a lot of psychatrists will be crazier than you are (at least if they're like the ones I know) and 2) drugs are a crap shoot and you'll probably have to go through a few (and possibly suffer some unpleasant side-effects) before you can find one that's effective. Someday, I hope we'll be able to DNA-test and maybe even custom-print drugs that precisely attack what's wrong with your brain chemistry without leaving you dysfunctional or dissolving your liver, but not today.
I've see strong indications that obsession and depression often are linked, although I don't know if that's ever been formally acknowledged. So treating one may help with the other.