Welcome to Lacuna Inc.

July 1, 2007 6:40 AM

Researchers have found they can use drugs to wipe away single, specific memorieswhile leaving other memories intact. By injecting an amnesia drug at the right time, when a subject was recalling a particular thought, neuro-scientists discovered they could disrupt the way the memory is stored and even make it disappear.
posted by psmealey (76 comments total)

"Don't drink the water...they put something in it, t-to make you forget. I... don't even remember how I got here."
posted by Avenger at 6:49 AM on July 1, 2007 [3 favorites]

I get a sick little shiver when I read an article like this - when I see something that Philip K. Dick or Alfred Bester wrote about, put there plainly in undramatic news-language on a website, surrounded by ads. Stem cells and biometrics and Allercats, the ability to find Earthlike planets, ECHELON, and now, this. Are we prepared to digest each of these new powers?

I'm full of bad memories, but I can't imagine consenting to this sort of a procedure. Not even some of the African refugees here in Glasgow who are fleeing from horror, I think, would want that in all its implications. Healing's not that simple. A psychological problem is an entire set of conditioned responses and habits of thinking; a memory might be a cause or a source, but its removal can't solve the problem.

A drug which helps a person temper emotional response has its own problems. What about the emotional response caused by conscience?

And yet, the frightening hope of it - that some day psychological damage could be healed, that the witch doctors we have in the mental health field could wield more effective tools. At best this healing be like physical therapy - aided by special tools and drugs, but hard work chosen and directed by the patient.

Of course, we're going to get these pieces of medical knowledge implanted in our Earth, whether we want them there or not. That's why it's so important that our government be moral, rational, fully informed, and in the best interests of everyone.
posted by By The Grace of God at 7:08 AM on July 1, 2007 [1 favorite]

The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, anyone?
posted by popcassady at 7:09 AM on July 1, 2007

Wait, what's that quote from?
posted by kbanas at 7:09 AM on July 1, 2007

Kbanas, it's from HalfLife 2.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 7:11 AM on July 1, 2007

AAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Really. Fucking scary.
posted by es_de_bah at 7:12 AM on July 1, 2007

popcassady is spot on. Lacuna, Inc. is the fictional company from the 2004 Jim Carrey film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Classic.
posted by charmston at 7:12 AM on July 1, 2007

"Okay Bob, now play C#. Look! Look at him brace for his little shock! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! So cute!"
posted by unknowncommand at 7:17 AM on July 1, 2007

I think this is unnerving because we like to think that our memories are whole and unsullied, safe in some cerebral storehouse even if our ability to recall them isn't always perfect. This kind of procedure demonstrates just how corrigible and imperfect memories really are. We forget stuff all the time, and other memories get contaminated by cultural expectation and natural decay until they don't represent what actually happened.

Look at the classic cases like Bartlett's War of the Ghosts and Loftus and Loftus' questioning of eyewitness reliability and you see that human memory is pretty susceptible to adulteration and loss without surgical intervention. You're not the person you were yesterday, and once something's over, it's gone for good. You're constantly in flux.
posted by RokkitNite at 7:19 AM on July 1, 2007 [5 favorites]

On a less reactionary note. Would this work for PTS? If you remove the memories of trauma, will the patient still be left with anxiety and over a now nameless fear?

It may just be my naive concept of how the human brain works, but can you really just poke a hole in it and leave the rest?
posted by es_de_bah at 7:20 AM on July 1, 2007

Please note that the human study did not erase memories: "We gave patients a drug that turns down the emotional part of the memory. It left the conscious part of the memory intact, so they could still remember all the details but without being overwhelmed by the memory."
posted by gubo at 7:26 AM on July 1, 2007

That's terrible! I wish I never read that article. I guess I better give them a call
posted by JeNeSaisQuoi at 7:32 AM on July 1, 2007 [3 favorites]

Yes indeed, dystopian scifi fans are crossing arms and nodding smugly all over the world.
es_de_bah: the article says that the drug was given to accident and rape victims, whose physiological signs of stress were lessened when recalling those events. It does not (according to the article) prevent them from recalling the events.

Additionally, this is something that can already happen. A long time ago, one of my friends got his shoulder dislocated. The doctors gave him something before popping it into place that prevented him from remembering the ordeal very well.
posted by boo_radley at 7:35 AM on July 1, 2007

One rticle about this sort of approach did in fact say it was directed in part toward PTS, and I am friendly with a guy who is under heavy meds because of PTS from Nam...and that was many years ago...and of course Iraq creating a new generation of war-damaged vets. I see no great harm done finally if it is left to the individual to decide whether or not to get such treatment.
posted by Postroad at 7:36 AM on July 1, 2007

This was on 60 minutes a few weeks ago.
posted by needs more cowbell at 7:55 AM on July 1, 2007

First of all, I'm shocked, shocked, nobody's mentioned that the name of the drug is propranolol.

Second, this seems great. I mean, if it only makes the bad emotions go away without deleting the actual memory, which is how I understand it works from the article. It seems that the journalist is conflating propranolol with the rat studies. Propranolol good, deleting memories bad. There... now that I've oversimplified everything I can let my thoughts on it harden into glass.
posted by Kattullus at 8:00 AM on July 1, 2007

I think it would be problematic to take this drug because you'd have to try not to remember anything you didn't want to forget while you take the drug (and how long is it active)?

Maybe you have to really concentrate on that memory, and other things you think about incidentally won't get erased, but still.
posted by delmoi at 8:04 AM on July 1, 2007

It's a mainstay of the magician's toolkit, like how clowns always have a rag soaked in ether.
posted by infinitewindow at 8:10 AM on July 1, 2007 [4 favorites]

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;
posted by empath at 8:12 AM on July 1, 2007

if it only makes the bad emotions go away without deleting the actual memory

The limbic system is pretty heavily involved in memory. You can't just remove the emotional component of a memory without significantly reducing the chances of future recall. I somehow doubt that a negatively associated memory is going to make some sort of bizarre leap from episodic to semantic memory.

Has anyone been able to find the journal in which this study or studies were published?
posted by solipsophistocracy at 8:14 AM on July 1, 2007

I just finished reading Charlie Stross' Glasshouse:

Robin is one of millions who have had a mind wipe, to forget wartime memories that are too painful or too dangerously inconvenient for someone else.

Great book. Great post: thanks, psmealey.
posted by bru at 8:18 AM on July 1, 2007

the article says that the drug was given to accident and rape victims, whose physiological signs of stress were lessened when recalling those events. It does not (according to the article) prevent them from recalling the events.

Yes, and all of the torture techniques used in Gitmo were developed by the CIA as part of a helpful program to better understand how to treat returning American POWs. In fact, it doesn't really matter what uses they intend for the drug, other uses will be found.
posted by doctor_negative at 8:20 AM on July 1, 2007 [1 favorite]

I can think offhand of one or two scenes I've witnessed with a lot of red in them that I wouldn't mind effacing in this manner.
posted by pax digita at 8:30 AM on July 1, 2007

Has anyone been able to find the journal in which this study or studies were published?

Abstract from PubMed. Full-text is by subscription only.
posted by klarck at 8:32 AM on July 1, 2007

If they can make me forget eight years of the Bush administration, I'm all for it.
posted by wfrgms at 8:48 AM on July 1, 2007 [1 favorite]

Researchers have found they can use drugs to wipe away single, specific memories

Didn't alcoholics figure this technique out centuries ago?
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 8:50 AM on July 1, 2007 [1 favorite]

Were this to be generously and specifically applied, there is still hope that I might be able to actually enjoy The Phantom Menace.
posted by flarbuse at 8:51 AM on July 1, 2007

A recent episode of Radio Lab covered this.
posted by subtle_squid at 8:54 AM on July 1, 2007

psychiatrists at McGill University, in Montreal, and Harvard University, in Boston, used an amnesia drug to "dampen" the memories of trauma victims.

"Ok, I'm remembering Cheney's sneer."
posted by orthogonality at 9:02 AM on July 1, 2007

"If they can make me forget eight years of the Bush administration, I'm all for it." -- wfrgms

If it can do that, I'm sure the Bush administration is for it too.
posted by hexatron at 9:16 AM on July 1, 2007

The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, anyone?

Yes, anyone? Anyone? For example, the very first sentence of the linked article? Or anyone?
posted by Flunkie at 9:32 AM on July 1, 2007 [1 favorite]

The description of this link is misleading. They cannot eliminate the specific emotional memory unless its being recalled at that time- which is not what this post infers. And the un-emotional memory is not erased.
posted by uni verse at 10:07 AM on July 1, 2007

This is very intriguing, not in the sense of "ohh waaa I want to forget that I didn't get the Barbie Dream House I wanted for Christmas 1976," but in the real possibility of helping people whose psyches have been devastated by abuse and/or trauma. I wonder, though, what kind of vetting process people would have to go through before a doctor decided that the patient's trauma was significant enough to be worthy of the treatment. What criteria would they use?
posted by amyms at 10:10 AM on July 1, 2007

Ah, so the trials did work.

iirc, one of the original people behind using beta blockers to relieve highly negative emotions from a memory had a daughter who was brutally raped and subsequently murdered. Both him and his wife were very deeply traumatised over this event.

After a meeting/conference where he presented preliminary findings on the efficacy of beta blockers and relieving trauma, he was asked whether he himself would take the beta blockers plus the psychological therapy if it was found to be truly efficacious (the theory is that memories need to be re-consolidated once evoked; the beta blockers impair the reconsolidation) and his reply was, "No."

I'm rather surprised at the very low n; 9 on drug, 10 on placebo... the trials I was thinking of were supposed to be much larger.
posted by porpoise at 10:10 AM on July 1, 2007

Wow. This could do wonders for couple's therapy!
posted by five fresh fish at 10:16 AM on July 1, 2007

There are definitely implications for warfare: The Guilt-Free Soldier.
posted by footnote at 10:17 AM on July 1, 2007

I've never heard of this "re-consolidation" threory of memory before, any body got any links that are better than the horrible pop science garbage in the FPP?
posted by afu at 10:51 AM on July 1, 2007 [1 favorite]

Memory consolidation and reconsolidation.
posted by porpoise at 11:20 AM on July 1, 2007 [1 favorite]

A skill needed in future is the ability not to think about something upon request. If you remember it, they wipe it. Meditation is going to have a practical day-to-day application.

Eternal Sunshine had it wrong. It's not about trying to remember things so they can't wipe them. It's about trying to forget things so they can't wipe them.
posted by humblepigeon at 11:24 AM on July 1, 2007

Personally, I like forgetting.
posted by Mr. President Dr. Steve Elvis America at 1:08 PM on July 1, 2007

This is fascinating. There is mention of something similar to this on the Wikipedia page for the amygdala.

The amygdalae, especially the basolateral nuclei, are involved in mediating the effects of emotional arousal on the strength of the memory for the event, as shown by many laboratories including that of James McGaugh. These laboratories have trained animals on a variety of learning tasks and found that drugs injected into the amygdala after training affect the animals' subsequent retention of the task. These tasks include basic classical conditioning tasks such as inhibitory avoidance, where a rat learns to associate a mild footshock with a particular compartment of an apparatus, and more complex tasks such as spatial or cued water maze, where a rat learns to swim to a platform to escape the water. If a drug that activates the amygdalae is injected into the amygdalae, the animals had better memory for the training in the task.[8] If a drug that inactivates the amygdalae is injected, the animals had impaired memory for the task.

So evidently there may also be drugs that do the opposite, which sounds much more appealing, though I don't know if this is in any way related.

I can't help but think of that one Ramachandran case study of this guy who could recognize these two people who looked and acted just like his parents (and, in fact, were) but he still believed them to be impostors. Despite the extreme example, I imagine the effects of this procedure are analogous to this in that one can remember the details of a person, place, or event but no longer have the impact of any previous emotional associations. I wonder if these kind of studies can produce any insights into Alzheimer's treatments.

Still, as far as potential risk goes, I find it interesting to contrast some of the adverse effects of beta blockers, like depression and sexual dysfunction, with some of the behavioral changes in the animal studies mentioned in the footnote in the Wikipedia quote above. Again, not to suggest that this kind of beta blocker therapy is in any way equivalent to an amygdalectomy or extreme cases of mental disorder, but it's interesting to note where the two might intersect.

Removal of the amygdala from female monkeys eliminate maternal behavior (resulting in infant neglect), but amygdalectomy actually increases the maternal behavior of female virgin rats (although this has been interpreted as reduced xenophobia or fear). Lesions to the amygdala of other primates disrupt social communication, but this does not occur in humans. The converse is true for lesions near Wernicke's area on the cerebral cortex -- humans are rendered verbally incoherent, but social communication of other primates is unaffected. Inputs to the human amygdala tend to be much more cognitive, whereas for other primates the inputs are more sensory. [...]

One experimenter cut the optic chiasm and forebrain commissures of monkeys after lesioning the amygdala on one side of the brain. These monkeys reacted in a wild fashion when shown threatening sights to the eye connected to the intact amygdala, but were tame when they viewed the same sights through the other eye.

A monkey will normally become excited at the sight of a banana, but becomes indifferent upon bilateral amygdalectomy. Food preferences based on visual appearance are eliminated. Nonetheless, animals show no change in the motivating power of food as a reward for work, even though the animals appear to be emotionally indifferent. It has been suggested that sensory input is given emotional & motivational significance by transmission to the amygdala.

Removal of both amygdalea from monkeys leads to tameness, loss of fear, "excessive" examination of objects (often with the mouth) and the eating of previously rejected foods. These symptoms are similar to those of the "Kluver-Bucy syndrome" produced in monkeys by removing the anterior temporal lobe (including the amygdala), except that the Kluver-Bucy monkeys also exhibit "hypersexuality". The amygdala seems to be responsible for a kind of "food xenophobia" because rats also more readily eat unknown substances if their amygdalae are damaged.

Brains of human schizophrenics show a significant reduction of the hippocampus and amygdala (especially the central and basolateral nuclei). PET scans show increased amygdala blood flow in depressed patients and in experimental subjects experiencing anticipatory anxiety prior to a mild shock.
posted by effwerd at 1:18 PM on July 1, 2007

This doesn't remove the memory or even the whole emotional charge associated with the memory-- it removes the physiological sensitization associated with the memory.

So, your heart rate doesn't go up and you don't panic when you recall the experience: you don't forget the experience and you don't suddenly believe that being raped was no big deal.

People are hyping the heck out of this and we're going to wind up with a situation where people will refuse a treatment that might be profoundly helpful for PTSD because they think it's something that it isn't.

This reminds me of the early stuff about how Prozac was going to be a terrible thing because everyone would be happy all the time and no one would mourn anymore and we'd all be zombies. Nope: for those for whom it works, it reduces *pathological* sadness, not normal sadness. For me, it means I don't cry at AT&T commercials about families being reunited, it doesn't mean I don't cry if something actually worth crying over happens.
posted by Maias at 1:38 PM on July 1, 2007

Maias is dead on, geeze the knee-jerk reaction is a little harsh isn't it? I was half expecting to see "Of course, so we'd all forget that WTC7 was brought down by explosives."

This isn't about forgetting an embarrassing one night stand. This is the ability to ride in a car after a car accident, or undress in front of a mirror after a rape.

What is most astonishing about the drug is that it appears to just work, no need to actively recall the memory. This would seem to signify that it rids the severe stressors that cause the physical reaction or irrational paranoia -- which are disassociated from the actual memory itself.
posted by geoff. at 2:03 PM on July 1, 2007

Oh, hells bells, y'all are just sucking the fun out of the idea. Sure, it's got practical uses, but those are just life-changing, not fantastical!
posted by five fresh fish at 2:20 PM on July 1, 2007

Propranolol is old news. They've been talking about it for 10 years. It has already had a 60 Minutes segment, and even been part of a Boston Legal episode last season. The drug doesn't whipe away the memories. It just breaks the emotional response that makes the memory so especially vivid that the patient re-lives the event.
posted by humanfont at 2:25 PM on July 1, 2007

This reminds me of the early stuff about how Prozac was going to be a terrible thing because everyone would be happy all the time and no one would mourn anymore and we'd all be zombies. Nope: for those for whom it works, it reduces *pathological* sadness, not normal sadness. For me, it means I don't cry at AT&T commercials about families being reunited, it doesn't mean I don't cry if something actually worth crying over happens.

Seconded.

I highly recommend watching the 60 Minutes segment for a better idea of how the drug works, and how it could help a lot of people.
posted by puffin at 2:51 PM on July 1, 2007

I have a few memories that need wiping.
posted by Henry C. Mabuse at 3:31 PM on July 1, 2007

This sounds wonderful but I don't think this drug can help with the pathological patterns that arise around the original traumas.

Twenty years ago, I had a bad injury to my left knee, which forced me to walk on crutches for a couple of months. The knee is perfectly fine now but over the years, I developed a gait that favors the right leg. If you look at my shoes, the right heel tends to wear out very quickly, much quicker than the left heel, even now, two decades later.

Does this analogy make sense?
posted by jason's_planet at 3:34 PM on July 1, 2007

"We can disremember it for you, wholesale."
posted by kozad at 4:15 PM on July 1, 2007

jason's_planet, actually this drug does exactly that. The whole point is to fix the pathological patterns. You take the drug and you walk normally; to fit into this analogy. It wouldn't be a useful PTSD therapy if it didn't. Since forgetting what gave you PTSD doesn't really help you understand why you blow off work and drink yourself into a hole everytime you hear a car backfire. I think I've even heard that many PTSD sufferers have trouble recalling the specific event(s) that caused the PTSD; particually in sexual abuse cases.
posted by humanfont at 4:33 PM on July 1, 2007

Sweet! Now all those bad things will settle down into your unconscious mind where they can't possibly do any harm.
posted by kid ichorous at 5:44 PM on July 1, 2007

“On a less reactionary note. Would this work for PTS? If you remove the memories of trauma, will the patient still be left with anxiety and over a now nameless fear?”

There's recent and controversial research showing that PTS is strongly reduced if people don't think about the traumatic event for a certain period of time after it. Probably we've all heard about this (I first heard of this in regard to 9/11), but maybe you haven't.

This flies in the face of traditional therapeutic techniques which rely on the possibility of a health integration of the experience.

Personally, this research challenged many of my preconceptions which, like many here, are strongly built upon the idea that what is best is to integrate everything you experience in a "healthy" way into your personality.

This research suggests that, in fact, it may not be best to attempt to remember and integrate everything. And why should that be best, exactly? It seems to me that there's only two reasons why so many of us hold to this idea. The first is just our (mostly fictional) sense of the integrity of self and integrity of memory. We have a need to believe that we remember everything correctly and that, in doing so, we are being "ourselves".

The second is the late-20th century American cultural ethos that opposed repression of memory or uncomfortable feelings—but it seems to me that this ethos was partly a function of the impulse I previously mentioned and partly a pragmatic response to the apparent ineffectiveness of repression with regard to increasing happiness. Repression was discarded wholly. But perhaps that was a mistake.

“This isn't about forgetting an embarrassing one night stand. This is the ability to ride in a car after a car accident, or undress in front of a mirror after a rape.”

The first drug, propranolol, and the related study is as you say. The second study mentioned, with mice, erased memories entirely.

I do find the negative reactions against this to be reactionary. While it's certainly the case that any sort of self-engineering can have dire consequences, it's also the case that we employ all sorts of self-engineering—psychological engineering—alll the time already, often with dire consequences. This could be good or bad, just as so many other things are, including all of the self-help books sold each year. Furthermore, I think that people should have a right to be whoever they want to be, including being someone who doesn't remember some things. Or even being a completely different person. Whatever. Psychological modification is no different than body modification, although both have consequences for other people and in the civil sphere that should be taken into account with regard to regulation.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 6:39 PM on July 1, 2007

Bah. With a fifth of Bushmills, I can forget a whole weekend.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 7:02 PM on July 1, 2007

I loves me the Bushmills, but Finlandia leaves less of "I got to fuck you last night" slime on me.
posted by porpoise at 10:40 PM on July 1, 2007

I just finished reading Charlie Stross' Glasshouse

Me too! Well worth it!
posted by Wolof at 11:08 PM on July 1, 2007

No one else has mentioned (genuis) screenwriter Charlie Kauffman, so I'm doing so now. Work:

Being John Malkovich
Human Nature
Adaptation
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Hope Leaves the Theater

Kaufman will make his directorial debut with his next project, Synecdoche, New York. Academy-award winner Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Michelle Williams are both attached to the film, which tells "the story of an anguished playwright who is forced to deal with several women in his life."

"I don’t really have anything against stories, but I just want to feel something happening. I read something that Emily Dickinson said that I’m going to paraphrase: you know something’s poetry if a shiver goes up your spine."
posted by chuckdarwin at 3:07 AM on July 2, 2007

Recall, Recall, Recall.

Wait, what was I talking about?
posted by tadellin at 6:46 AM on July 2, 2007

Great post
posted by Smedleyman at 11:12 AM on July 2, 2007

great post
posted by Smedleyman at 11:13 AM on July 2, 2007

Great Post
posted by Smedleyman at 11:14 AM on July 2, 2007

Srsly, I dunno. Maybe it will help. I don’t think it’s for me. Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, all that.
posted by Smedleyman at 11:14 AM on July 2, 2007

I wonder, will people be lining up days ahead of time at the Memory-Be-Gone shop? Will Steve Jobs be one of them?

Will someone think of a way to extract and gel-encapsulate our potent miseries, to be sold on Ebay for undisclosed amounts to eager connoisseurs everywhere? Will they be converted to video to become instant hits on YouSob?

Or will they simply bat-wing vanish back into the dark swirling mists, wait a hundred years, return to haunt another?
posted by Twang at 1:41 PM on July 2, 2007

Maybe you could ask for a dose of this with your netflix delivery, and then the world wouldn't have to worry about spoilers anymore. (I kid, I know it doesn't work like that. But it sure would've been nice to watch The Sixth Sense without knowing the ending.)
posted by vytae at 2:00 PM on July 2, 2007

Last year when I had a brain procedure, a CAT angiogram, I was informed I had to be awake during the process, which was assumed to be traumatic to the patient. The anesthesiologist gave me the option of giving me a drug that would wipe out the memory of the procedure, a permanent but limited amnesia.

This blew my mind, nyuck nyuck, that such a drug existed. But sure enough, it does. Versed. I wanted to remember everything, thought the procedure rocked, it was so cool. Glad I didn't have the Versed.

It's spooky to think drugs are being cooked up that can delete memories. But apparently EMDR therapy-treatment can do a kind of deleting as well in cases of invasive, recurring PTSD flashbacks.
posted by nickyskye at 8:28 PM on July 2, 2007

Versed is a standard ingredient in the general anesthesia cocktail. General anesthetics have a bad side-effect of having many patients wake up both unexpectedly during a procedure and, more typically, during recovery—and they don't just wake up, they wake up in an almost psychotic pure terror for unknown reasons presumably drug-related. The solution to this pesky problem is to simply erase the patient's memories of these terrors via versed and a few other similarly-acting memory suppression drugs. If you've had any serious surgery when you've been under general anesthetic, you've probably had versed and you may have awakened several times in a post-surgical terror. Thank goodness you don't remember it.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 11:53 PM on July 2, 2007

Oh, this reminds me of an idea I had years ago that I may have mentioned here before: a memory suppression party. Get together with a few friends, control the circumstances such that no one is able to fake it, and then everyone takes a drug that will wipe the events of the next few hours from everyone's memory. Hilarity ensues.

Actually, tragedy and horror might ensue, which is the plot of a novel I've outlined.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 11:56 PM on July 2, 2007

Let us not forget Ray Loriga's beautiful and crushing Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore.

Sorry about the unintentional pun.
posted by Minus215Cee at 3:22 AM on July 3, 2007

EMDR doesn't delete memories either-- and doesn't work any better than standard cognitive behavioral trauma therapy. It allows people to re-integrate disruptive traumatic memories so they are more like normal memories.

Ethereall, the rat study didn't necessarily show any actual memory deleting either. Rats don't have cognitive memories, (or at least not ones we can measure in any way) they only have emotional or state memories-- what these therapies appear to do is delete or more likely reduce the emotional or state memory. So, if the rat no longer responds with stress to the tone, it is a very similar thing to a human no longer having an elevated heart rate with a traumatic memory. Doesn't mean the verbal memory of the incident is gone-- but since rats don't have verbal memories or we don't know how to interrogate them if they do, we don't know if the "whole" memory is deleted.
posted by Maias at 3:48 PM on July 5, 2007

Maias, the results of this study and its interpretation are apparently the subject of debate in the field. However, the researchers themselves claim that the complete memory is lost, not just its emotional component. And your conjecture about the qualitative nature of rat memory is worse than conjecture, actually, and it's quite anthropocentric.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 5:00 PM on July 5, 2007

My point is that you cannot know that: there is nothing *but* an emotional component in the rat *unless* you want to make an anthropomorphic argument.

Therefore, in humans, it is likely that the same drug would only wipe the emotional component. if the researchers are arguing that it is also wiping a motor component or something else like that, my argument still holds since again, even if you erase both the motor part and the emotional part, in humans there's still a cognitive bit.

Either rats have some "cognition" that gets wiped with this drug -- unlikely. If they don't have it, then why would the drug affect human cognition?

If they *do* have it, then you might argue that it would wipe a memory in humans, but I just don't think there's any rational basis to make such an argument.
posted by Maias at 7:16 PM on July 5, 2007

I haven't read any of the papers involved, myself. But the article linked to here, and some others that I was able to find on the web relating to this research, clearly say that the researchers claim to have "erased" a memory, not just the emotional component. If these articles are in error, I will gladly stand corrected.

As for your basis for claiming something other than what this article and others I've read assert about this research, I'm not aware of any research that validates the human exceptionalism you're assuming in your argument. Indeed, the very idea of your postulated "non-cognitive" and purely emotive memory is nonsensical. I cannot see how a memory which is nothing but an emotional state could affect behavior—much less allow predictable conditioning. Once you've allowed that this "emotional memory" is associated with an action and/or perception, you've invoked the necessity of what you're calling cognition and cognitive memory. The irony here is that if we assume that rat memory is qualitatively like human memory, then there's a good argument to be made that we need strong evidence that the entire memory is being erased, rather than just its emotional component, as in the case of propranolol in human test subjects.

I can only guess that you've been led astray by a combination of your own strong outdated conventionalist ideas of animal cognition with a related consequential misunderstanding of the propranolol result.

You hold to an anthropocentric human exceptionalism that denies "cognition" to other animals in such a way that also requires another assumption of a strong dualism with regard to cognition and emotion.

But cognition and emotion are not a dualism, they are not essentially different things. Rather, they are the same thing manifested differently in brain function. It's all cognition, though one might say (somewhat inaccurately) that "emotion" is cognition that occurs on a "lower" level of processing. Emotions are cognition involved strongly with the limbic system—and your "emotional memories" are "cognitive memories" of cognitive events which strongly involved the limbic system. A recollection is in some sense a brain reenactment of an event, a re-experiencing of an event, and memories with strong limbic system involvement evoke a strong duplicate limbic system response. Propranolol interferes with that; and the storing again of the memory therefore lacks much of that involvement.

I don't think anyone would deny that other animals—and rats, certainly—have a much lower capacity to form plans, assume/detect distant causal relationships, and otherwise think in the abstract than do humans. But in your assertion of memory that is only emotion, that rats experience nothing but emotion, you're pushing this commonsensical and anti-anthropomorphic notion to an absurd extreme. There must be something to a rat's memory other than the limbic experience or else, as I've said, it couldn't possibly have an influence on behavior. Indeed, memory in that case would be useless. An emotional response in a memory has to have a context in order for it to have utility. That context, even if it is as minimal as "activity X" or "object Y", is the necessary part of any memory. The degree of involvement with the limbic system, however, can vary.

Personally, my non-expert intuition and knowledge make me question whether the researchers are wrong and your essential claim (without its rationalization) is right. One would expect that with the "lower animals" that emotive content of memories would be far more crucial than it is to humans and, as a result, the relevance of a memory with little emotional context to an animal's behavior may be very small. Thus its effect might be so small as to make it effectively appear that the memory itself no longer exists. Or, alternatively and in keeping with the scientists' claims, maybe because it has little or not emotional context, the memory does, in fact, cease to exist because for a rat a memory cannot be effectively stored without that context. Given the behavior of propranolol, however, these assumptions being true, we couldn't expect the rat experiments to apply to humans.

Even so, the simple fact of the existence of amnesia from a multitude of external causes—drugs, ECT, psychological and physical trauma, tumors, etc.—we know that entire memories can be lost. We also know from experimentation that memories are dynamic with regard to recollection of them. It would be surprising, then, to find that we couldn't find a way to create targeted amnesia.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 11:41 AM on July 6, 2007

Ethereal, what I'm saying is while there has to be a motor component to rat cognition--"scary feeling= run away"-- I don't think there is a "I have had this scary feeling before so I better run" thought in a rat.

Why wouldn't emotion be enough to trigger the motor action without anything else? It certainly works that way in humans when you have a startle response or you retract your hand from a burning object without even having been aware of having done so. The emotion of pain triggers the motor action: no thought needed.

Thus, if you take away the scary feeling, the rat is not going to run. But I don't think that would erase in a human the thought aspect.

I'm certainly not saying that you can't erase cognitive memories-- clearly, you can if alcohol is anything to go by (although the question there is whether they were ever "stored" in the first place), but I'm saying that no one has shown that you can erase a specific memory by taking a drug and then recalling it. You can tone down the emotional reaction to that memory, yes, but that's very, very different from erasing it. And much more useful and less ethically problematic.
posted by Maias at 4:06 PM on July 7, 2007

Can they come up with a pill I can take that would help me forget Pluto Nash?
posted by ZachsMind at 4:20 PM on July 7, 2007

The emotion of pain triggers the motor action: no thought needed.

Actually, no. In the instance you give, the severity or quality of pain is such that it triggers an autonomic response in the spinal cord, causing you to twitch away.

IANAD, so someone correct me if I'm wrong. Seems to be what I remember from my biology classes.
posted by five fresh fish at 4:30 PM on July 7, 2007

You're right.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 11:42 PM on July 7, 2007

Actually, no, brainstem activity is required for the startle response-- though I guess if you consider the brainstem part of the spinal cord, it's technically correct.
posted by Maias at 4:46 PM on July 8, 2007