Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory

Read the article here.


If you are too lazy to read the whole thing, here are a few interesting quotes and my thoughts on them:


"Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain. Could make you forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, even a bad habit.

Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills."


"Millions of people might be tempted to erase a severely painful memory, for instance — but what if, in the process, they lost other, personally important memories that were somehow related? Would a treatment that “cleared” the learned habits of addiction only tempt people to experiment more widely?

And perhaps even more important, when scientists find a drug to strengthen memory, will everyone feel compelled to use it?"

"'This possibility of memory editing has enormous possibilities and raises huge ethical issues,' said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, a neurobiologist at Harvard."



"Ethical issues"....understatement! Can you say mind control?! Or the possibility of erasing the wrong memories? Or how about being able to erase certain aspects of one's personality?? That could create the desire for everyone to be a "perfect human." Skynet, here we come!

School of Shock

Wow.

This is an article about a real school in MA that shocks kids with behavior disorders as part of their "treatment plan". The kids, some as young as nine years old, are hooked up to an array of electrodes 24/7 and shocked for any bad behavior.

To quote one part, it says "Marguerite Famolare brought her son Michael to the Rotenberg Center six years ago, after he attacked her so aggressively she had to call 911 and, in a separate incident, flipped over a kitchen table onto a tutor. Michael, now 19, suffers from mental retardation and severe autism. These days, when he comes home for a visit, Marguerite carries his shock activator in her purse. All she has to do, she says, is show it to him. "He'll automatically comply to whatever my signal command may be, whether it is 'Put on your seatbelt,' or 'Hand me that apple,' or 'Sit appropriately and eat your food,'" she says. "It's made him a human being, a civilized human being."

It sounds to me like it made him an obediant robot, complying to any command.

Lara (http://www.blogger.com/profile/11480095954577891278), sent this article to me in a comment on the blog below this.

Check it out by clicking the title of this blog, going to the comments section of my last blog, or copying and pasting this into your browswer window:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock.html