Memories, who needs em?

[swestrup]

In a very controversial experiment, biochemists have been testing a drug that is designed to help fight Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome by reducing the emotional imprint of recent traumatic experiences. While I can see many very good psychological uses for such a thing, I can also imagine people really messing themselves up if such a drug was ever widely available. Still, I can only imagine that widespread access to this, and far more powerful, neural tinkering tools are inevitable, as the cost of automatic drug synthesis machiens continues to fall.

Comments

[ims.livejournal.com]

As such a person I'm inclined to think that this is exactly the sort of thing such a drug might be useful for. Yes, with the drug one might not learn (depending on to what extent it wipes out the memory), but without it the situation gets progessively worse, not better, anyway: having felt like a fool in the first encounter one is more nervous in the second and so almost certainly acts more like a fool leading to more nervousness and so on.

When I think about it I have used such a trick. I had as an undergraduate (and still to some extent have) a problem that even if I think an essay is good when I hand it in, I start picking holes in it in retrospect, generally to the point it's painful to think about within three days. But I discovered a mental trick (I'm not quite sure how it worked) of forgetting about the essay as soon as I handed it in; in at least one case it worked so well that I really had forgotten the essay entirely when I got it back a week later. I suppose this means I really learnt nothing from the experience of writing the essay, but it did let me finish my BA.... (Alas, the technique was far from perfect, and I had to withdraw from my first attempt at an MA because not only couldn't I write essays any more but I couldn't even do the reading for them....)