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.