A Drug that Erases Bad Memories?

November 11, 2008

One of the most wonderfully bizarre flicks that I’ve seen in recent years is  2005’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In the movie,  Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet play former lovers who, after their painful breakup, each become clients of a company called Lacuna Inc., which offers a miraculous technology that can erase unpleasant memories. (The term “lacuna” means a gap or missing part; there’s a disorder called lacunar amnesia, in which a person develops a gap in his or her memory about a specific event.) Here’s the trailer, which gives you a feel for where the story goes.

Eternal Sunshine might seem like another improbable mind-bending fantasy from the keyboard of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (whose even more twisted Adaptation is another of my favorites). But maybe not. As the esteemed, deadly serious scientific journal Technology Review reports, researchers have made a breakthrough that may presage a real-life version of Lacuna’s memory-erasing process. But instead of the electronic brain-wave gizmo in the film, this process involves a chemical.

For more than two decades, researchers have been studying the chemical — a protein called alpha-CaM kinase II — for its role in learning and memory consolidation. To better understand the protein, a few years ago, Joe Tsien, a neurobiologist at the Medical College of Georgia, in Augusta, created a mouse in which he could activate or inhibit sensitivity to alpha-CaM kinase II.

In the most recent results, Tsien found that when the mice recalled long-term memories while the protein was overexpressed in their brains, the combination appeared to selectively delete those memories. He and his collaborators first put the mice in a chamber where the animals heard a tone, then followed up the tone with a mild shock. The resulting associations: the chamber is a very bad place, and the tone foretells miserable things.

Then, a month later — enough time to ensure that the mice's long-term memory had been consolidated — the researchers placed the animals in a totally different chamber, overexpressed the protein, and played the tone. The mice showed no fear of the shock-associated sound. But these same mice, when placed in the original shock chamber, showed a classic fear response. Tsien had, in effect, erased one part of the memory (the one associated with the tone recall) while leaving the other intact.

"One thing that we're really intrigued by is that this is a selective erasure," Tsien says. "We know that erasure occurred very quickly, and was initiated by the recall itself."

The really nifty thing about alpha-CaM kinase II over-expression is that it not only can erase a specific memory, but it leaves other memories intact and doesn’t otherwise damage the brain. As a result, some memory researchers think that it holds the promise of someday providing an effective treatment for people afflicted with severe phobias or post-traumatic stress disorder. Again, from Technology Review:

"The study is quite interesting from a number of points of view," says Mark Mayford, who studies the molecular basis of memory at the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, CA. He notes that current treatments for memory "extinction" consist of very long-term therapy, in which patients are asked to recall fearful memories in safe situations, with the hope that the connection between the fear and the memory will gradually weaken.

"But people are very interested in devising a way where you could come up with a drug to expedite a way to do that," he says. That kind of treatment could change a memory by scrambling things up just in the neurons that are active during the specific act of the specific recollection. "That would be a very powerful thing," Mayford says.

Indeed. But I can also think of a plethora of ways in which such a drug could be misused. Unscrupulous politicians could dose the voting public en masse, and cause them to forget unfulfilled promises, disastrous wars and mortifying gaffes in debates. Criminals could erase the memories of their offenses from potential court witnesses. Hollywood could churn out an endless number of big-budget sequels that were basically the same schlocky movies over and over, and brainwashed audiences would be none the wiser. (Oh wait, they’re already doing that.) But even if its use were carefully restricted and it was dispensed only by mental health professionals, I’m not convinced that wiping out the recollection of painful experiences would be a good thing. If Victor Frankl had wiped out the horrific memories from his time in a Nazi death camp, for example, he probably never would have written Man’s Search for Meaning.   

So, what do you think? Is a memory-erasing drug a good idea, or not? Express your opinion below.

Comments

[Caffeine Driven Stress Magnet]

Can I use it to wipe out the past eight years?

[Bill Owen]

I think I may have had a dose of this drug already.

[out of whack]

I'm nearly 50 years old. I realize right off the bat that makes me very un-cool. However, it has been my experience that the bad memories are part of what makes me who I am. If you take away the unpleasant parts of my life, that takes away part of ME. If we learn from our mistakes, and you remove the mistakes, then we've lost what we've learned. I'll keep my memories; the good and the bad, thank you.

[Eager to Forget]

I'm only 40 but I would welcome a chance to wipe the slate clean and start over, without a lot of negative thoughts.

[Manny]

I think this drug would be a terrible idea. How are we ever going to learn from our mistakes if we can't even remember them?

[Palin thinks dinosaurs coexisted with cavemen]

I thought the whole point of the movie was that erasing one's bad memories was a bad idea.

[Kelly Wager]

This drug will get in the hands of the wrong people... they always do. Govt? Teenagers? What else will the drug mess with in the brain, probably don't even know yet. Not a good idea...

[a.t.]

It might be better to just use the drug for strictly medical purposes. Then again, if people's memories are driving them insane, maybe we should let natural selection do its handiwork.

[drug treatment centers]

It is scary to think about all of the possibilities and of course the drawbacks or side effects that come with all of these new medicines and discoveries. If it sounds too good to be true...