In the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Jim Carrey has his memory erased to forget a painful relationship. Scientists are a long way off performing this type of procedure in people, but studies suggest that it is, indeed, possible.
Credit: Focus Features
JASON NICOLL IS TORMENTED by the past. In 1994, when he was 21 years old, he was deployed with the Australian Defence Force to serve six months in Rwanda. This was at the height of the genocide.
"I saw dead bodies, people who'd stood on land mines, people who'd been shot or hacked up with machetes. Once, I carried a young girl, about eight or nine years old, who'd been shot in the chest.
"The round had torn most of her spine out. There was a massive hole, and the way she was looking at me … I put her on the table for the medics to start working on her. It wasn't long afterwards that she died."
Fifteen years on, Nicoll still has flashbacks and nightmares. Certain smells - a rotting banana in a child's school bags, for example - bring terrible memories flooding back, sending him dry-retching into the yard of his house in Forrest Beach, Queensland.
"There was always something rotting around the place - whether it was fruit or meat or humans," he says of Rwanda. It wasn't until 2006, when Nicoll suffered a breakdown, that he was finally diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and given a medical discharge from the Australian Army.
SINCE THEN, HE'S COMPLETED a two-month course of PTSD treatment, had anger management therapy and seen a variety of psychiatrists, psychologists and counsellors.
He's learned strategies to help him cope. But nothing has been able to take away the horror associated with those memories. And he's only one of more than a million Australian sufferers, according to a 2007 Australian Bureau of Statistics report
About one third of people with PTSD don't really benefit from existing treatments, says Mark Creamer, director of the Australian Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health at the University of Melbourne.
"That is a concern," he says. "We need to think about what alternatives might be available." The good news is that teams of scientists around the world are doing just that.
A recent flurry of research is suggesting new ways to get rid of the fear associated with certain memories, and even to delete those memories - permanently. Not only is this work throwing light on PTSD, it's helping to answer fundamental questions about how we form memories, how we store them and how we access them. This new understanding is leading to developments that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
In London, neuroscientists have read people's memories by scanning their brains. A team in the U.S. is building an artificial human memory centre in their lab. Another group thinks we'll soon be able to turbo-charge our memory by consciously altering electrical activity in our brains. "It's an exciting time for researchers in the field," says Elizabeth Loftus, a leading expert on memory at the University of California at Irvine.
Memory.
What about cellular memory ? Is the memory still stored on a cellular level reguardless of the interuption? How would this affect the body?
learning to forget
hello in the 1970's in carmel california a young psychologist helped me forget trauma experienced in childhood his phd thesis was on the table in waiting room he led into a hypnotic state and asked me to stop at age 3 or 5, etc. then he worked with "selective forgetting" transforming negative feelings/emotions into to positive or neutral. many of these troubling memories were erased and i have no adverse reactions to certain situations any longer he is now a quite famous one in berkeley california tapes and all that his name is emmett miller m.d.
blessings rev joyce bove'e
Memories Are Important
Memories are important to who we are. This includes memories of traumatic experiences as well as those that are more pleasant. In fact, experiences that are negative often do the most to build character and intellectual and emotional depth. If we erase those that we don't like, we risk becoming little more than vacant automatons. Besides, since half of life is, ultimately, pretty awful, where do we draw the line?
Propanalol and trauma
As a survivor of childhood clergy sexual abuse and a PTSD sufferer I can attest to the benefits of Propanalol although the way it is used appears to be quiet different that that descried in some of the studies.
rgds
JohnB
john@molestedcatholics.com
Painful Memories
The First dug for meomory loss?
What about Heartsease Viola tricolor?
http://scienceforums.com/topic/11765-drug-to-erase-bad-memories/