http://www.livescience.com/health/081022-erased-memories.html
Scientists have successfully selected and safely erased specific memories in a mouse's brain, leaving others intact, it was announced today.
The erasure can be done while a mouse tries to retrieve an individual memory, said Joe Z. Tsien, brain scientist and co-director of the Brain & Behavior Discovery Institute at the Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine.
Sholy hit.
CRAZY! and it sounds like they can do this with drugs, rather than with open-brain surgery or whatever. It'll be a while before we can do this stuff to humans, but just imagine the possible hilarious abuses of potential
(http://www.zannel.com/webservices/content/NIWMLZX988/Image-568x440-JPG.jpg)
I wonder if it's possible to recover the memories over time.
Eternal sunshine!
:D
ETA.... i think i heard about this on Radio Labs on NPR (love that show!) about a year ago....
It's not especially new, but it's news to me.
Anyhow, who wants to bet the Pentagon will seize this technology as soon as it's finished and repurpose it for interrogation coverups?
That is, after all, how they got PEPs.
Quote from: Felix on October 23, 2008, 05:01:19 PM
It's not especially new, but it's news to me.
Anyhow, who wants to bet the Pentagon will seize this technology as soon as it's finished and repurpose it for interrogation coverups?
That is, after all, how they got PEPs.
I thought they (as in THEM, incl. the CIA) were already able to do this (perhaps less elegantly) since the MKUltra program?...
also, whas PEPs?
As I understand it, the CIA's methods were brutal and randomized. People who came through it often couldn't remember vast portions of their life, not just selected portions. It could take months of electro-shocks, prescribed drug use and other forms of abuse to do what this does so much more easily and painlessly.
It also leaves other tell tale signs, such as incontinence, addiction, shakes and the like, which I imagine this method would not.
It's more ethical than beating the living fuck out of people, true.
But, like the PEP, it leaves no traces but still does a potentially awful thing to people.
Iptuous,
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/09/pulsed-laser-fi.html