Deleting Memory - Science & Ethics

[Voyageur]

A few days ago while driving, had a chance to listen to this one hour discussion from the radio show 'Ideas' with Historian, Paul Kennedy. If you have the chance and are interested, would recommend this. There are a number of heart wrenching personal PTSD stories and than the science of isolating these types of memories and working on their "deletion" - as in some type of direct physical cognitive technologies. There are some good arguments that might say they may not have it right, they may not understand where memory really exists.

Of the people being interviewed (see list below), was particularly interested in the words of Dr. Françoise Baylis, of Dalhousie University - Chair in Bioethics and Philosophy. For some reason, she is not listed within the credits on the story itself below, yet she made up a good part of the last section and offers some important personal and societal reasoning against messing around in this scientific end, osit.

As it is, the memories of a PSTD event are different for many, and it is often not easy to overcome their effects. Fortunately, without having to resort to lasers cutting out groups of interacting neurons or psychopharmacology dampening, there are a great deal of threads here, such as EE and writing exercises that help people with good results.



Story is called Hit Delete

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

_http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2014/09/24/hit-delete/

The radio program itself is at this link _http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2014/09/24/hit-delete/#

Some neuroscientists believe they are on the verge of being able to delete memories. It could mean a cure for people who suffer from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). But at what cost to the individual and at what cost to society? Dick Miller delves into the science and the ethics of memory deletion.

I think one day, hopefully in the not-too-distant future, we will be able to delete a memory."
Dr. Sheena Josselyn

Participants in the program:

Dr. Sheena Josselyn, memory researcher and Senior Scientist at The Research Institute of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

Dr. Karim Nader, memory researcher and Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at McGill University in Montreal.

Dr. Albert Wong, research scientist in the Neuroscience Department at the University of Toronto and staff psychiatrist at CAMH in Toronto.

Dr. Ruth Lanius, Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the PTSD Research Unit at the University of Western Ontario in London Ontario.

Dan Campbell, former soldier with the Canadian Army. Dan had two tours of duty in Afghanistan.

Jim Steel, former soldier with the Canadian Army. Jim fought in the conflicts in both Bosnia and Afghanistan.

Sherri Bain, sexual assault survivor and advocate on behalf of Rehtaeh Parsons.

 

[mkrnhr]

The idea of directly manipulating people's memories is troublesome, even if the PTB already does so through indirect means through the media to blur any understanding of what happens in the world. However, this mechanistic intervention in someone's brain is at another level. Various aspects have been reported on SOTT:

http://www.sott.net/article/284586-Scientists-discover-how-to-manipulate-memories-and-erase-fear
http://www.sott.net/article/225677-Memory-Can-Be-Manipulated-Scientists-Claim
http://www.sott.net/article/154929-Moral-philosopher-questions-memory-manipulation

The problem can manifest at different levels:
-If they can alter traumatic memories, what other memories can they alter as well, and how can it be used against people.
-Deleting memories instead of processing them would sabotage a learning opportunity and deprive the soul of completing a karmic task, only to have it manifesting differently, one way or another.
-This "technology" relies on a mechanistic understanding where consciousness is a byproduct of brain activity, and an intervention based on an incomplete understanding may have unknown consequences, whether on the short or longer terms.
These are a few questions on the fly, but the bottom line is that the don't seem to understand what they're doing, OSIT.

 

[Voyageur]

The problem can manifest at different levels:
-If they can alter traumatic memories, what other memories can they alter as well, and how can it be used against people.
-Deleting memories instead of processing them would sabotage a learning opportunity and deprive the soul of completing a karmic task, only to have it manifesting differently, one way or another.
-This "technology" relies on a mechanistic understanding where consciousness is a byproduct of brain activity, and an intervention based on an incomplete understanding may have unknown consequences, whether on the short or longer terms.
These are a few questions on the fly, but the bottom line is that the don't seem to understand what they're doing, OSIT.

Exactly, this is what Françoise Baylis was getting at. Not only this, she made the comment that these memories are shared collectively, it becomes important to share them and for society to hold them, learn from them - it's who we are and they can't, nor should not, be hidden away or dampened out.

 

[obyvatel]

The nature of memory is somewhat of an enigma as neuroscientists have been hard-pressed to precisely locate memory storage sites. There are different hypothesis regarding this. One from Rupert Sheldrake is that memory may not be physically stored somewhere in the brain and the neuronal connections are the receiver circuits that decode the memory. Even mainstream science cannot discount observations which lead to the hypothesis that neuronal connections are gestalts. So I agree with
[quote author=mkrnhr]
This "technology" relies on a mechanistic understanding where consciousness is a byproduct of brain activity, and an intervention based on an incomplete understanding may have unknown consequences, whether on the short or longer terms.
[/quote]