"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" could soon become a reality

[NSA TORTURE TECHNOLOGY, NEWS and RESEARCH]

Saturday, Dec 31, 2011 1:00 PM 19:13:53 PST
Should we erase painful memories?

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" could soon become a reality -- but the concept
raises some thorny questions

By Alison Winter

One of the most tenacious themes of 20th-century memory research was the idea that people
tormented by the memories of terrible experiences could benefit from remembering them, and
from remembering them better. The assumption - broadly indebted to psychoanalysis - was
that psychological records of traumatic events often failed to be fully "integrated" into
conscious memories. As long as these records remained "dissociated," the sufferer was
compelled to "relive" them instead of benignly remembering them. The more fully and
appropriately one remembered terrible events, the more attenuated would be their emotional
power.

But in the 1990s - a time when psychoanalytic assumptions were being challenged as never
before - neuroscience researchers developed a new framework for thinking about
remembering, forgetting, and the mind's record of past events. One result was a highly
controversial new paradigm for treating traumatic memories. The problem with bad memories,
these new researchers claimed, is not their complex and unresolved relation to one's sense
of self, but the simple fact that they are unpleasant. These researchers defined emotional
memory not in terms of repressed ideas, but by certain patterns of neuron action and the
chemical changes they triggered. The next step was to change these patterns.

In the 19th century, character was commonly portrayed as something that was built up by
daily experience and personal choices, through the memories and habits created by those
everyday events. Character was the result of how one responded, moment by moment, to the
challenges of daily life, because those responses built up a kind of internal machinery of
habit. Character was defined, in a way, as an accretion of memory. The idea of "building
character" meant striving to make appropriate choices because the hardware one created
would become difficult or impossible to change later.

One scholar of the present day who has expressed concerns about memory dampening has used
a different analogy to describe the relation between memory and personality, but
nevertheless one that describes personality as being made out of discrete memories.
William B. Hurlbut, a consulting professor in human biology at Stanford University, wrote
that "the pattern of our personality is like a Persian rug." It was built "one knot at a
time, each woven into the others. There's a continuity to self, a sense that who we are is
based upon solid, reliable experience. We build our whole interpretation and understanding
of the world based upon that experience or on the accuracy of our memories."

As recently as the 1990s, people who thought of themselves as survivors of terrible trauma
often defined themselves in relation to what they remembered (or what they did not): They
were survivors because they had survived certain defining events.Their character as mature
adults came from "working through" these terrible memories. But there were also
"survivors" who felt they had not truly survived their memories. They described a wounded
self whose bad experiences stood in the way of personal realization. This latter
convention involved the idea of a hidden, unimpaired self encumbered by adverse
conditions. The idea is similar in some respects to the characterization used in the
marketing of recent psychotropic drugs, especially Prozac. These drugs' enthusiasts
sometimes declared that taking them allowed their "true" selves to emerge, often for the
first time.

Philosophers, therapists, filmmakers and bloggers have been quick to reflect on the
implications of memory erasure. One of the best-known projects to explore the subject is
the 2004 film "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," in which the main character
attempts to have memories of his ex-girlfriend deleted from his mind pharmaceutically. The
film embraces the new neuroscience of emotion, focusing on memories of feelings and the
complex ways different kinds and parts of memories are stored in different places in the
brain. Central to the plot is the idea that memories with different emotional associations
are stored differently.

Emotions associated with a past event can be stored independently of the "data" of the
event itself, so that someone with amnesia about a particular event that took place, for
instance, at a certain location could feel an echo of the emotion associated with that
location in spite of not recalling what happened. The idea of reconsolidation is central
not only to the basic plot (the lead man is made to remember his girlfriend so that
memories of her can be systematically removed) but also to one particularly important
element of the movie, in which some part of the consciousness of the main character
becomes aware of the memory erasure as it is happening, and he changes his mind. Because
he is anesthetized, he is unable to tell the operator to stop the procedure.

What follows evokes the idea of a Memory Palace - the medieval technique of committing
things to memory by visualizing each piece of information as a room in a great palace. To
recall a specific piece of information, one would imagine walking through the appropriate
room. In the film, the lead character and his memories conspire together to save the
memory records by stashing them in unlikely places on the palace grounds.

The first speculative steps are now being taken in an attempt to develop techniques of
what is being called "therapeutic forgetting." Military veterans suffering from PTSD are
currently serving as subjects in research projects on using propranolol to mitigate the
effects of wartime trauma. Some veterans' advocates criticize the project because they see
it as a "metaphor" for how the "administration, Defense Department, and Veterans Affairs
officials, not to mention many Americans, are approaching the problem of war trauma during
the Iraq experience."

The argument is that terrible combat experiences are "part of a soldier's life" and are
"embedded in our national psyche, too," and that these treatments reflect an illegitimate
wish to forget the pain suffered by war veterans. Tara McKelvey, who researched veterans'
attitudes to the research project, quoted one veteran as disapproving of the project on
the grounds that "problems have to be dealt with." This comment came from a veteran who
spends time "helping other veterans deal with their ghosts, and he gives talks to high
school and college students about war." McKelvey's informant felt that the definition of
who he was "comes from remembering the pain and dealing with it - not from trying to
forget it." The assumption here is that treating the pain of war pharmacologically is
equivalent to minimizing, discounting, disrespecting and ultimately setting aside
altogether the sacrifices made by veterans, and by society itself. People who objected to
the possibility of altering emotional memories with drugs were concerned that this
amounted to avoiding one's true problems instead of "dealing" with them. An artificial
record of the individual past would by the same token contribute to a skewed collective
memory of the costs of war.

In addition to the work with veterans, there have been pilot studies with civilians in
emergency rooms. In 2002, psychiatrist Roger Pitman of Harvard took a group of 31
volunteers from the emergency rooms at Massachusetts General Hospital, all people who had
suffered some traumatic event, and for 10 days treated some with a placebo and the rest
with propranolol [a beta blocker]. Those who received propranolol later had no stressful
physical response to reminders of the original trauma, while almost half of the others
did. Should those E.R. patients have been worried about the possible legal implications of
taking the drug? Could one claim to be as good a witness once one's memory had been
altered by propranolol? And in a civil suit, could the defense argue that less harm had
been done, since the plaintiff had avoided much of the emotional damage that an undrugged
victim would have suffered? Attorneys did indeed ask about the implications for witness
testimony, damages, and more generally, a devaluation of harm to victims of crime. One
legal scholar framed this as a choice between protecting memory "authenticity" (a category
he used with some skepticism) and "freedom of memory." Protecting "authenticity" could not
be done without sacrificing our freedom to control our own minds, including our acts of
recall.

The anxiety provoked by the idea of "memory dampening" is so intriguing that even the
President's Council on Bioethics, convened by President George W. Bush in his first term,
thought the issue important enough to reflect on it alongside discussions of cloning and
stem-cell research. Editing memories could "disconnect people from reality or their true
selves," the council warned. While it did not give a definition of "selfhood," it did give
examples of how such techniques could warp us by "falsifying our perception and
understanding of the world." The potential technique "risks making shameful acts seem less
shameful, or terrible acts less terrible, than they really are."

But the mere possibility seems to have threatened an important convention for representing
memory in relation to personal identity. These worries draw their force from a deep-seated
attachment to two related beliefs: first, that we are, in some ambiguous but important
way, the accretion of our life experiences; and second, that those life experiences are
perfectly preserved even if our ability to remember them is far from perfect. When
Alzheimer's disease patients lose significant amounts of memory, dismayed friends often
say that their very selves have crumbled or faded away and that in some literal way they
are "no longer themselves."

The thought here is not that people believe their memories are perfect - far from it.
Common understandings of memory centrally involve the idea that memories are unreliable,
fickle and capricious. But there is another belief about memory that has been articulated
by many figures in memory research: that in some fundamental way, secreted within us are
perfect records of past experiences, even if we might never access them consciously.

The concerns of the President's Council naturally raised the question of how to
distinguish psychic pain from physical pain, since it was this very distinction that the
council failed to discuss explicitly. The council did not set itself against the use of
physical anesthesia, even though there are well-known cases where pain is thought to serve
a useful purpose. Yet physical anesthetics have some relevant common ground with the
prospective memory technologies, and there is a long history of resistance to the idea of
physical anesthesia on grounds similar to some of the arguments being mounted here.
Skeptics argued that a loss of sensation would disconnect sufferers from a valuable
experience (as in childbirth) and from information they needed to have. Before the advent
of anesthesia, techniques that seemed to involve an intentional suspension of sensation
could trigger alarm on a scale that now seems almost inconceivable.

For instance, in the 1830s, during disputes over whether mesmerism could create an altered
state of mind in which an individual was entirely incapable of sensation, the editor of a
major London medical journal urged his readers to consider such a thing impossible not
merely because it was implausible but because it would be an immense moral affront and a
threat to one's personal integrity. "Consider the implications," he urged his readers:
"the teeth could be pulled from one's head without one's knowledge."

The 1840s and 1850s saw a dramatic shift in the status of physical pain, specifically in
its relation to self-knowledge, self-control and personal integrity. Anesthesia was
initially upsetting because it challenged a convention for thinking about personal
identity and self-control to which full sensory experience was central. Viewed from the
era of anesthesia, this anxiety has come to look quaint or even inexplicable. In this era
the suspension of sensation is taken to be radically distinct from how we understand
ourselves. Could the same happen about remembering? The neurosciences of the present day
are inaugurating a period of uneasy speculation about moral and identity issues that
promises to be the most profound and far-reaching of all - at least until the next
revolution in the memory sciences.

Reprinted with permission from "Memory: Fragments of a Modern History," by Alison Winter.
Published by the University of Chicago Press. Copyright 2012. University of Chicago. All
rights reserved.

Alison Winter is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago and the
author of "Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain," also published by the
University of Chicago Press. More Alison Winter

[Tom Keske]

correction:

One of the most PERNICIOUS themes of 20th-century memory research was the

idea that people
tormented by the memories of terrible experiences could benefit from

remembering them.


That is the kind of thing that you get from pseudo-science, which has
too long characterized the field of psychiatry. Arm-chair theories, backed
by overzealous advocates who are burnishing their own credentials while
overindulging in "confirmation bias" by way of fuzzy, subjective
metrics or dubiously "quantified" metrics. All of which is then hyped by
attention-hungry lay publications and by a myth-making popular culture
to a gullible public.

Tom Keske

[liberal]

On Jan 4, 10:40 pm, Mr.B1ack <b...@barrk.net> wrote:
> "NSA TORTURE TECHNOLOGY, NEWS and RESEARCH"

>    It has been discovered that human memory retrieval works
>    much like a 'flash drive'. When it is accessed, it is
>    ERASED from long-term storage and held in some kind of
>    'scratch RAM' - and then must be immediately re-written.

Got a cite? As I understand it, every long term memory is hardwired
into the brain. Some neurologists think that's why sleep is necessary,
the hardwiring takes place when most of the brain is inactive.
However, failure to access said memory allows the brain to slowly
erase it.



>    There are some drugs that can inhibit the re-writing
>    process. No doubt the spooks are developing even stronger
>    versions because of the opportunities for nastiness
>    they'd create.
>
>    So, basically, you get a dose ... someone asks you to
>    recall a specific event in as much detail as you can ...
>    and that's the LAST time you'll be able to do so.
>
>    There's also something really creepy, really dangerous,
>    about the notion of selectively erasing experiences -
>    even IF they were bad ones. The sum of our memories are
>    WHAT WE ARE ... start erasing here and there (and the
>    criteria for doing so will get more and more slack) and
>    you're not 'you' anymore, but someone else, some
>    artificial person.

That would be a major improvement in your case.

Stop cross-posting to "rec.sport.cricket", makes you look (look???)
like an idiot.