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Paycheck-Style Memory Erasure: How Close Are We? 433

Posted by timothy from the did-we-already-post-this dept.
Quirk writes "Scientific American takes a look at the movie Paycheck, based on Philip K. Dick's work of the same name. In the movie ...'a crack reverse engineer helps companies steal and improve upon the technology of their rivals, then has his memory of the time he spent working for them erased.' '...the main character gets several months' worth of his memories erased by having individual neurons zapped. Is that possible?'"
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Paycheck-Style Memory Erasure: How Close Are We? More

Paycheck-Style Memory Erasure: How Close Are We?

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  • Still a ways off (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The brain is one of the least understood organs in our bodies, and tampering with it in any form is still quite tricky and dangerous. Sure, we might have a rough idea where your memory of your first day of school is, but erasing that and nothing else isn't something we're even close to. I'd say this is still at least 50 years away, and probably more like 100.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:14PM (#7823981)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • the brains way of setting up a RAID5 system. When a few neurons die, others are their to take their place and rebuild the data best as possible.


        Does this mean that a RAID5 array will start making up data off the top of its processor? If so, I think I know how SCO's legal team plans to prove their case...
      • I'm not a psychologist but I have taken coursework in the physical psychology so feel free to take this with a grain of salt.

        While fractals and holographs sound very sexy, I don't know of any work done to prove this model of memory. I don't even know if we have the capability to detect this. If you do know of any research done is this vein, please, post some links. I'd be interested.

        That said, the holographic/fractal model of memory does sound right to me and elegant to boot. One thing to remember tho

    • Congrats to Paycheck... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Overly Critical Guy ( 663429 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:24PM (#7824036)
      ...for sticking in the most obvious, cheesy, cliched line you can have whenever you're doing a man-on-the-run, stolen-identity story.

      "YOU WIPED MY MEMORY!"

      I can't help but laugh at Ben Affleck delivering this. "Tell us what happened." "I can't. You wiped my memory!"

      Ben's voice echoes in my mind amidst maniacal laughter at the copiousness of its cheese. "YOU WIPED MY MEMORY!"

      Do I blame myself? When I first heard the premise of yet another bastardized Phillip K. Dick movie and saw that Ben Affleck was in it, and heard that it was about his memory being erased (gee, that's never been done before), why did I immediately expect that exact line to be inserted somewhere in the trailer? "YOU WIPED MY MEMORY!" It's like I wanted it to be there, like touching a sore tooth.

      Anyone else remember, "He's got a bomb in his RIBCAGE!" That other Phillip Dick movie and its cheesy line repeated over and over in all the trailers actually became a running gag over at Ain't-It-Cool talkbacks. "HE'S GOT A BOMB IN HIS RIBCAGE!"

      Now I have "HE'S GOT A BOMB IN HIS RIBCAGE!" and "YOU WIPED MY MEMORY!" battling each other surrounded by torrents of laughter in my mind.

      Help me. "YOU WIPED MY MEMORY!"

    • Re:Still a ways off (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mgv ( 198488 )
      You can erase about the last 5 minutes with various forms of treatment and trauma. This produces true retrograde amnesia, and is seen with electroconvulsive therapy.

      This is probably because the memory is still stored in a short term electrical loop which can be disrupted before it is stored in some change in neural architecture.

      Certain drugs produce antegrade amnesia (forward amnesia) including the benzodiazepines such as midazolam, and flunitrazepam (used as a "date rape" drug). You can actually look q

  • Umm (Score:2, Insightful)

    by zephc ( 225327 )
    No. You don't just form/strengthen one new connection for every memory. If we knew enough to erase memories, we would know enough to back them up too.

    • Re:Umm (Score:4, Informative)

      by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @08:14PM (#7824271) Homepage Journal
      No. You don't just form strengthen one new connection for every memory. If we knew enough to erase memories, we would know enough to back them up too.

      Actually, memories are formed from consolidations of neuronal connections most likely in a somewhat regionally loosely distributed fashion. Think of it as distributed storage of files on particular subnetworks. Of course we neuroscientists do not really know exactly how this is done or even how specific thoughts are encoded. But it is thought by some/many camps that consciousness and memories are an emergent phenomenon that arises out of networks of neuronal connections. The two categories can also be subdivided into consciousness and two forms of memory, long term and short term. (Of course there are those who believe that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts but....this is science we are talking about). Disruptions of memory are often due to strategic loss of connections in particular portions of cortex, thus pathology becomes critically informative in the study of memory and consciousness.

  • I have proof it exists (Score:5, Funny)

    by cluge ( 114877 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @06:54PM (#7823862) Homepage
    Slashdot editors have had this happen to them! That is why they we have repeat stories, sometimes one right after the other!

  • Is it possible.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    No.

  • Why wouldn't it be possible? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 28, 2003 @06:56PM (#7823871)
    It happens to me all the time. An aquantance walks up to me an my brain selectively forgets their name.

    But do I ever forget something useless like the theme song to Gilligan's Island? NOOOOOooooooOOOO!

  • Evidence (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gregfortune ( 313889 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @06:56PM (#7823874)
    At the very least, there would be physical evidence that a procedure like that had been performed. Doesn't seem like a very stealthy or effective technique when it would be possible to detect.

    • Re:Evidence (Score:5, Funny)

      by anotherone ( 132088 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @06:58PM (#7823887)
      But if you found out that you'd had your memory erased, they'd just erase it again!

      • Re:Evidence (Score:3, Funny)

        by HeghmoH ( 13204 )
        Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky has a rather horrifying subplot that revolves around exactly that idea. The Evil Thugs don't want to kill a certain Good Guy, and in fact they want to keep her nice, so whenever she finds out that the Evil Thugs are actually Evil, they stick her in the magic MRI and erase the memory.
      • Not you, the people who might have a vested interest in insuring that you have not been bought/comprimised/etc...

  • "Is this possible?" (Score:5, Funny)

    by infornogr ( 603568 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @06:57PM (#7823880)
    I don't remember, you insensitive clod.

  • I used to know... (Score:4, Funny)

    by FunWithHeadlines ( 644929 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @06:58PM (#7823888) Homepage
    "the main character gets several months' worth of his memories erased by having individual neurons zapped. Is that possible?'"

    I could have sworn I knew the answer to that question prior to my last job...

  • What for? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @06:59PM (#7823898)
    If a company hires someone to steal technology, if it's done carefully (i.e. no email records, no obvious plagiarism), the only way to prove it would be to crak open the guy's skull and download his memories. Since it's not possible, why would there be a need to erase the person's memory in the first place? As far as I know, the best proof it's possible is Microsoft: nobody there has been forcedly lobotomized, and the strong company culture ensures that employees think technology theft as survival of the fittest, fair game, corporate smartness or other brutal but honest reasons that won't conflict with employees' sense of morality.

    • Yep I'm flaming, but I could not resist:
      I know, the best proof it's possible is Microsoft: nobody there has been forcedly lobotomized, and the strong company culture ensures that employees think technology theft as survival of the fittest, fair game, corporate smartness or other brutal but honest reasons that won't conflict with employees' sense of morality.

      Can you show proof that no one at MS has been lobotomized? Either a lobotomy or low moral standards are the root cause of the tripe they market to
    • I suspect that both of these technologies (reading individual memories and erasing individual memories) are closely related and will arrive simultaneously, so this problem will not occur.
    • There are always ways to make someone talk, be it offering a good plea bargain (or a wad of cash) or threatening bodily harm.

      Erasing the memories of those involved is thus quite worthwhile.
  • Now it makes sense. This is clearly what happened to Sydney [alias-tv.com] :)

  • Movie based on social implications (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:00PM (#7823905) Homepage
    A new movie is coming out that deals with some of the social implications about the ability to do this.

    It is called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [imdb.com]. It is the story of a couple who are having problems with their relationship, and have their memories of each other erased to see if it helps things.

  • You just blew the premise of the movie in that post. Thanks!

  • Un Nerving (Score:5, Informative)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:02PM (#7823913) Journal
    SA: Are there any ways to erase memories by stimulating the brain?

    JM: The dominant evidence that goes back over 50 years is that one can block or certainly reduce memories formed within the past several hours by treating human or animal subjects with electro-convulsive shock. But it's nonselective; whatever happened in that past several hours will be gone. And that's rather gross stimulation applied to the skull. What Larry Squire at UC San Diego has shown is that if human subjects are repeatedly given electro-convulsive shocks (several times a week for several weeks), they will have impaired global memory that goes back many months, but that memory will gradually recover. He did this in the late 1980s.

    Notice how these types keep saying that this stuff is good for you ....

    • Re:Un Nerving (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bomb_number_20 ( 168641 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:38PM (#7824100)
      There is a lot of controversy surrounding this.

      For certain types of mental illness, electro-convulsive therapy is still considered an acceptable form of treatment by some physicians. I think the voltage has been lowered a bit and the duration, frequency and method of zapping is more tightly controlled, but it is still used quite regularly and has been since at least the 60s- maybe earlier.

      One of the side effects of this treatment is a temporary loss of short-term memory. Suuposedly, it eventually returns, but patients lose short-term memory of events leading up to the treatment.

      Having seen this sort of thing first-hand, i find it disturbing that anyone could support it. The brain, for the most part, is uncharted territory; and the fact that, without really knowing anything about it, we are willing to pump juice through someones brain because it 'seems to help' is insane to me.

      To me, the concept is similar to patching a for loop that isnt working right by screwing with the counter in the test. It may get things working- but it also has the potential to break a lot of other things. It's the wrong way to go about doing things.

      • Re:Un Nerving (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Thurn und Taxis ( 411165 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @08:53PM (#7824457) Homepage
        You've hit upon the fundamental difference between scientists and doctors here - which, incidentally, is why most people of either profession refuse to take the other seriously. Scientists think the way you do: if something's going wrong and you don't understand what's happening, then figure it out before you do anything that could screw things up even worse. Doctors think in a different way: do whatever is necessary, and whatever you can, to keep the patient alive and as healthy as possible; it doesn't matter if you understand how the treatment works or not (for example, we have no idea how most drugs have their effect, which is a large part of the reason why drug development is so expensive and time-consuming and requires clinical trials). The difference stems from the fact that scientists want to understand (or at least predict) the behavior of the universe, whereas doctors want to keep people alive.

        To bring this back to the discussion at hand, there are two competing theories of how our minds work. In the first, we have specific cells devoted to specific memories - e.g., you have a "grandmother cell" that remembers your grandmother, and if that cell were to die, you'd lose the memory. In the second, our brain is a state machine, so the memory of you grandmother is spread throughout the activity of the entire brain. There's evidence to support both ideas, which suggests that the truth is somewhere in the middle. From the standpoint of believable movie science, do we understand enough about the brain to be able to erase someone's memory precisely, accurately, and repeatably, knowing exactly what we're doing? No. That's the scientist's point of view. Do we have enough tools at our command to be able to erase part of someone's memory if it were really, really important and we had plenty of time and money to spend on the problem? Maybe. That's the doctor's point of view (not that a doctor would do this necessarily, but it illustrates the solve-a-practical-problem vs. understand-the-fundamental-principles mentality that separates the two cultures).

        (and, once again, five mod points go unused.)

        • No grandmother cell (Score:5, Insightful)

          by obtuse ( 79208 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @09:32PM (#7824614) Journal
          I don't believe anyone in neurobiology believes in the grandmother cell. It's still used to describe how memory might work, but everything we know about the brain indicates distributed storage.

          There are cells dedicated to specific purposes more general than grandmother recognition. These functional areas are dedicated to things like speaking or understanding speech (seperate areas of the brain.) For another example, everything you see is pretty much projected onto the neurons on the surface your occipital lobe.

          A person with brain injury can lose specific skills or abilities. My grandmother lost the ability to speak after a stroke. She relearned to speak.

          They can lose types of memory. People with Korsakoff's syndrome live with no intermediate or long term memory. Loss of short term memory preceding a traumatic event is more common. After an accident it is common for the injured party to not remember the moments leading up to the accident, because that information essentially never got written to intermediate or long term memory.

          But the current view is that memory is highly distributed. If you use a neural net as a trivial model of how the brain might work, you will realize that for a large and complex neural net with diverse purposes, there isn't a single cell devoted to anything. All the information is contained in the strength connections between cells.

          Karl Pribram used the phrase "holographic brain." The image on a hologram is distributed, so if you break it in two, you have two complete images, although each is less detailed. If you scratch a hologram, you don't lose part of the image, you lose detail overall.

          There are drugs that prevent short term memory from being retained. Those drugs also keep you from being very alert or useful for anything, and the only people who use them to that purpose are rapists.

          So, to answer the poster's question: No way.

          Crude manipulation of the mind is hard. Hypnosis can't make you do something you'd be unwilling to do otherwise. Truth serums ain't. Lie detectors don't. I'd suggest that truth serums & lie detectors are far simpler tasks than erasing human memory based on content.

          The brain is just too vast & complex for such a trivial approach. You need to use something subtle and powerful to manipulate the mind, like advertising or religion.

          • Re:No grandmother cell (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Thurn und Taxis ( 411165 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @11:09PM (#7825200) Homepage
            You're right, the grandmother-cell idea has been discredited (and fwiw, I don't believe it either). But so has the complete-distributed-processing idea (i.e., the holographic memory concept you mentioned). It's absolutely untrue that your entire brain is involved in each thing you brain does, just as it's absolutely untrue each brain function can be mapped to a single neuron - and that was exactly the point I was trying to make when I said:

            There's evidence to support both ideas, which suggests that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

            The "holographic brain" idea you mentioned is clearly untrue, because if you break the brain in two (e.g., cut the corpus callosum), you don't end up with two identical brains, each less detailed. You end up with two different brains, each containing some of the information stored in the other (for example, you pointed out indirectly that Broca's and Wernicke's areas are associated with different inputs and outputs). So the information in the brain isn't totally distributed. OTOH, cases such as your grandmother's, in which she was able to regain an ability she had lost, argue that brain abilities aren't totally localized.

            I'm going to ignore your suggestion that advertising and religion are more powerful than science and medicine, because it ignores my other point - that you can manipulate something without really understanding it. But I think my two conclusions still stand:

            (1) The brain uses both local and distributed processing, and we don't understand the nature and extent of either; and
            (2) Even without understanding something, we can manipulate it in such a way as to achieve the desired affect.
  • Philip K Dick is the author the short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. This is the story that the movie Total Recall was based on.

    Just thought people might like to know this.

    • Re:Philip K Dick (Score:5, Interesting)

      by twiddlingbits ( 707452 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:26PM (#7824047)
      To take that concept one more step read Kiln People by David Brin. You can make an infinite number of clones of yourself that each last a few hours to a few days, and if you wish you can download the memories the clone experiences during his/her "life". So if the clone does something illegal, the "owner" has no recollection of it if the clone dies before the memories are downloaded. Excellent book that deals with exactly this question, while disquised as a detective novel.
    • No, the movie Total Recal is based on the Peirs Anthony book called Total Recal which in turn is based on the Philip K Dick story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:05PM (#7823936)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Ben Affleck is closer to... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:07PM (#7823946)
    ...winning a Nobel Prize than science is to understanding memory, let alone erasing it.

  • Fear and Grade Point Average (Score:4, Funny)

    by Quirk ( 36086 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:07PM (#7823948) Homepage Journal
    "We learned that strong emotions make for strong memories."

    Procrastinators cramming for exams and late term papers may have the right idea.

  • I remeber (Score:2, Redundant)

    by Scrameustache ( 459504 )
    Someone actually did invent this, but he tried the technique on himself...
  • ... that when we finally figure out how it works, the brain will prove to be a multiresolution (read: holographic) storage device, rather than a simple network of interconnected neurons. It only makes sense, based on what we've seen in patients that have been injured by arrows, bullets, and other projectiles without losing any specific memories or abilities.

    If that's true, then no, it won't ever be practical to identify the exact physical location of a particular memory, because there isn't one.
    • I like that idea, but I don't think it's the case. For those who don't know what the parent poster means, you can cut a hologram up and each piece will have the complete image. We do know that the brain's functions *are* physically separated, though it can be "reprogammed" in a sense, where one portion of the brain can learn to take over for a portion that has been damaged. I agree that the memories won't be grouped in a single place corresponding to the specific memory, but based on branching paths through
    • Feel the need to yammer on like this?

      Wtf does "multiresolution" have to do with the word "holographic" would it kill people to learn how to communicate (i.e. not be retards?)

      Anyway, we do know how the brain works. It's been studied for a century and more research goes on every day. No one has ever uncovered any evidence that its anything other then a neural network. If you look at a centuries worth of scientific research, "it only makes sense".

      In fact, there are lots of localized, spesific parts

  • Yes (Score:2, Funny)

    by Crazy Ukrainian ( 581427 )
    Sure it's possible, it just turned out to be a really really bad thing so we erased our memories of how to do it.

  • Memory erasure? No, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by argent ( 18001 ) <peter@slashdot . ... t a r o nga.com> on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:17PM (#7823999) Homepage Journal
    There's one kind of "memory erasure" that's possible, but it wouldn't be very useful for this kind of application.

    There's a condition known as "anterograde amnesia", where the short term memories never get laid down as long term memories... so you can remember what you were doing a few seconds ago, but you have no idea what you were doing an hour ago. Conceivably this could be imposed, and if you were still capable of doing useful work you could do it and have no long-term memories of what happened.

    The problem is that this wouldn't apply to something that took more than a few minutes of connected thought. You wouldn't be able to get three years of development out of someone under these conditions.

    But... what if you could remind yourself and make notes quickly enough?

    There's a short story I've been trying to write for a year or so, now (and doing poorly at... I have no problem coming up with the crazy ideas, I just suck at dialog and plot and that kind of thing) and it turns on this.

    I start out with a technology that was (in this future history) developed for video games. It takes practice, but with a little work you can "save" and "read" messages and eventually memories and skills offline, in a game cartridge. This means, when you're playing Final Fantasy XCII you can remember (if you want) what 'Cloud' or 'Yufffie' know... when you're playing that character.

    So what happens when your gamer has anterograde amnesia? Why, he has memories he can access in the cartridge that can't be laid down in long term memory. They're not quite the same as the real thing, but they're good enough for his job. So he goes in to work each day, has his long term memory disabled, and gets his work persona plugged in. He could even work on mutually untrusting secret projects without breaking security.

    The story starts from there, and I won't try and tell it now (besides, as I said, it sucks, except for the twist at the end... my daughter really liked the twist at the end). BUT... this seems like something that may be a bit closer to realistic than being able to unwind organic memory that specifically.
    • where the short term memories never get laid down as long term memories... so you can remember what you were doing a few seconds ago, but you have no idea what you were doing an hour ago

      Ah HEM, we're talking about Paycheck, not Memento.
    • Someone should really make a movie about a guy with this problem. Maybe he could forget why his wife died or something. I think Guy Pearce [imdb.com] is available.

    • Re:Memory erasure? No, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by waynemcdougall ( 631415 ) <slashdot@codeworks.gen.nz> on Sunday December 28, 2003 @11:18PM (#7825246) Homepage
      I once read this short SF story...and don't bother asking for title or author. It was what I'd consider Hard SF and was probably in an anthology....

      The plot as I recall from lo these two decades past was something like this:

      Our hero is being (brutally) interrogated by the enemy. The bad interrogator goes to strike our hero - who has the training/skills (genetic engeineering) to pull back just enough to stop the blow from hurting, but makes the decision not to, so he doesn't give away his enhanced powers.

      His captors take him away to be locked up until he is more cooperative...and administer a drug which eliminates his short term memory....every few minutes his short term memory is wiped clean...ha ha thinks his captors - he is no risk now. Just before the drug is administered our hero thinks up a little checklist - the last thing he will remember - something like : stop...look around...think...

      It turns out he meant to be captured all along because his job is to rescue the important person (boffin) held in the complex...he escapes his cell....interesting point is his memory gets wiped just as he is getting in to the air duct and he's not sure if he's coming or going...decides on the basis of the scresw position I think...

      Find the boffin, makes his escape, series of memory wipes in the process...has a memory wipe as he is running towards a plane to escape in with the boffin over his shoulder, being shot at, and thinks it's pretty obvious what's happening now!

      Finally takes off and back to safety...after a few hours flight he realises he's had no memory wipes recently so the drug has worn off....an escape and a resuce and he can't remember how he did it.

      Ta da! The end.

      Now I'd be impressed (but not surprised) if someone is able to identify this (and/or correct my more excessive errors)

  • Because of the way the brain stores its memories, aside from whether you could read someone's entire brain structure, edit it, then replace it completely, it would be impossible to erase several months worth of memories from someone's brain completely without causing some serious side effects. So many associations would have to be broken that the person would be reduced to a babbling idiot.

    Now, if you wanted to erase someone's memory of the last few HOURS, that's a whole 'nother matter.
  • It will always be easier to kill or kidnap a person than to try and erase portions of their memory. By the time you have someone in some kind of clinical setting you will have already taken as much risk as silencing them some other way. Those people who would be tempted to erase memory probably aren't morally against doing other simpler less expensive physical harm to protect a secret.
  • ...well, almost.

    "Drugs that substantially dim memories are already in use," says Wrye Sententia, Director of the CCLE

    That's from an article [cognitiveliberty.org] on the site of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics [cognitiveliberty.org] which was published a few weeks ago. It also has several links to more information.

  • We have absolutly no idea how most memory works. A very small amount of knowlage has been gained about how we learn motor actions (for example, how to type, how to ride a bike, but thats about it)

    We also know how some very simple invertibrets 'learn' things, but these beings have a hardwired nervious system (every neuron is connected to all the same neurons in each animal, like an electronic circuit, rather then being grown chaoticaly as in higher life forms)

    To date, no one has ever found an engram, o

  • Point of Semantics (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:35PM (#7824081) Homepage Journal

    'a crack reverse engineer helps companies steal and improve upon the technology of their rivals' [emphasis mine]

    Hate to be a nitpicker, but buying a company's product, taking it apart, and learning how it works is not stealing. It doesn't matter if you're the company's competitor, it still isn't stealing. You have a perfect right to do this, and employ the knowledge gained to your own advantage.

    Now, if the technologies in the product are patented, and you built and sold your own products based on them, then you'd have a case of patent infringement. Which still isn't stealing.

    Schwab

  • What a funny coincidence. I just got the whole UFO DVD set [plus.com] for christmas, and they have a nifty "amnesia" drug they administer to everyone who come accross their secret bases...
  • I find the 'second' type of memory wipe in the movie to be the more plausible. They inject him with a radioactive marker, then he goes to work. Time to erase his memory, they re-inject him and that takes care of any new information made after the radioactive marker. The injected stuff in the second case would probably have to be some type of nanite that can get in there and just take out the 'marked' cells.

    I highly doubt we'll be able to get actual 'visuals' out of a person's head in anything resembling t
    • This isn't likely. Long term memory is probably not simply a matter of chemicals stored in cells... it's changes in the cells themselves, and in the interconnections between cells, using the same processes that go into cell repair and metabolism.

      Yes, the radioactive markers would be selectively taken up by the cells that were more active while he was working on the problem, but each cell doesn't represent a memory, it represents the associations involved in that memory. Take out the chemicals, or even the
  • What is te problem with the technique to erase memory? The workings of our brain! We do not reserve a seperate space of memory for every seperate thing we do, but spread it over alot of neurons (unlike longterm computer storage). This happens in two stages, just as our cache and secondary storage works in our PC. The 'cache' can actually be erased (some say it will happen each night during our dreams), but the longterm storage cannot, unless we also remove other memories.

    Maybe this can best be compared wit
  • Is that possible?

    No.

  • all things are possible... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jamesh ( 87723 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:42PM (#7824116)
    ... except maybe this. Computer neural networks are modelled on how we think the human brain works and so the following possibly applies to the human brain too.

    Say you have a computer simulated neural network consisting of 10 neurons, and it can classify 20 different inputs into one of 3 different outputs. The network as a whole 'knows' how to do the classification, the combination of all neurons is responsible for the outcome. In order to adjust it so that it mis-classified one of the 20 inputs, you would most likely have to adjust the weighting (connection) of each neuron, or at least several.

    Have you ever done a Rubix(sp?) Cube? Cheating aside, it's quite tricky to move only selected pieces around without mucking up the rest. Each single action you perform affects multiple pieces. You need to make numerous single gross movements to have a net fine movement. Tinkering with the human brain is probably a lot like that only much much trickier. And without the pretty colors. And you can't pull it apart and put it back together, or just move the labels around to do what you want. And if you tried to manipulate a brain like you do a cube you'd probably get your hands a lot dirtier. Okay... maybe it wasn't such a good analogy.

    IANABD (Brain Doctor), but remember, the connections between neurons in the brain aren't electronic like you might think of computer memory as electronic. The interaction between them is, partly, but the actual physical connection isn't and as I understand it, the connection configuration is where the 'information' is stored. In order to get in and physically change connections you'd have to be tinkering with the actual neuron cells, requiring physical interaction which would be really hard for anything not on the surface.

    I guess that leaves us with drugs, brainwashing, or tiny little robots, or something we haven't thought of yet. Far simpler to simply pay someone lots of money to pretend they've forgotten the thing you wanted to erase.

  • Tag! You're Uhhh... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DumbSwede ( 521261 ) <slashdotbin@hotmail.com> on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:48PM (#7824140) Homepage Journal
    I read the article, and while the overall answer is no, I can see a couple of loop holes. If some kind of tracer could be introduced into the body, it might be possible to tag specific neuronal connections as having occurred after introducing the tagging agent. I haven't seen the movie, but if the plan is to wipe the memories from the start, you would dose your subject with this tagging agent before acquiring the memories to be erased.

    Now granted memory is a combination of forming new connections and strengthening or weakening others. But I suspect severing all new connections formed in a tight time frame would have the desired effect, and would probably only require the right chemical agent latching onto the specially designed tagging agent which as been bound to the sites of all new connections. How these tagging and latching agents are activated, and how they would actually sever the new connections I will not speculate. For an even more thorough wiping, recently strengthened and weakened connections could also be tagged and severed, but at the risk of losing more memory than intended.

    Good God! I have probably just inspired some research project.

  • "...the main character gets several months' worth of his memories erased by having individual neurons zapped. Is that possible?"

    You've never been to college, have you? I can "zap" several million neurons over the course of a single weekend.

    Thanks to modern technology, many "mind altering" concoctions are available, over the counter, for public consumption! Pay attention to the various ingredients as "malted hops" or "barley" seem to be the most popular.

    Avoid those cheap alternatives like "Mad Dog 20/2

  • ...that I have a perfect memory?
  • It's almost like some movie execs were sitting around and someone said "I'd love to make an interesting thriller with great twists and a killer core concept, but I don't want the mildly retarded to have a hard time following the plot."
  • Apparently the audience for Paycheck forgot the plots been done before in Total Recall.

    Then again, an action movie was never really full of plot.

    Tim, they got your wife!
    But I'm not married.
    You are now, to America.

  • what's even more far-fetched... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wwest4 ( 183559 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:59PM (#7824204)
    i'm one of those loonies that thinks the brain is a reducible machine (of the dennett variety) and that it's possible that memory can be erased in such a manner.


    what seems sillier is the idea that in a quasi near future that there is such a thing as a "reverse engineer" [whips out his business card mini cd]. hearing that job title made me nearly choke up my popcorn during the preview (or maybe it was just the fact that very non-nerdy affleck was cast in such a role).


    unless said brain manipulation is used to augment the human brain's capacity for interdisciplinary science and engineering knowledge, i predict that a metrosexual frat boy like affleck couldn't even get an interview for such a position in any quasi-futuristic timeline.

    fah-q!

  • Heck, I was doing that in my early twenties with Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboys, orange microdots and Black Beauties.

  • Two letters: H.M. (Score:4, Informative)

    by sm.arson ( 559130 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @08:13PM (#7824264) Homepage
    I'm not sure this was mentioned elsewhere, but every psychology student learns about the patient H.M., who underwent a complete hippocampal lombotomy to treat his severe epilepsy (thankfully, they no longer do this drastic surgery today).

    Long story short; by completely removing his hippocampus, researchers discovered that they eliminated H.M.'s ability to form new memories, and that existing memories for a certain time prior to the operation were erased. H.M. can hold a conversation with you, but within a few minutes he will have forgotten what he was just talking about, and who he was talking to.

    I'm not sure what the current research is, but it is widely believed that newly formed memories take some time to become permanent. Of course, the length of time and the specific brain regions involved are still under debate, but any good electrial disturbance to your brain (a siezure, for instance, or getting knocked really hard on your head), will distrupt this system and will wipe out any memories that you have recently acquired.

    And, the larger the disruption, the longer the period of time that gets erased, some believe.

    This phenomenon of retrograde amnesia has been the center of the debate about the human memory system for a number of decades now. (This was the subject of my last presentation as an undergrad at UIUC, by the way.)

  • VERSED--sedative used e.g. for colonoscopies (Score:5, Informative)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @08:25PM (#7824327) Homepage
    For what it's worth, there is a drug called VERSED (pronounced vur-said, two syllables) that is generally classified as "a sedative," one of whose properties is that it erases your memory of whatever you experienced while under sedation.

    According to its maker, Roche Laboratories, "in one study, 73% of the patients who received intramuscularly had no recall of memory cards shown 30 minutes after drug administration."

    It is commonly used during colonoscopies, not because colonoscopies are terribly traumatic, but because it provides superior muscular relaxation and enhances the effect of fentanyl (an anesthetic agent).

    Nevertheless, the manufacturer describes it as "an agent for sedation/anxiolysis/amnesia;" that is, amnesia is considered to be one of the purposes for which it might be administered.

  • How is this research ethical? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RobertFisher ( 21116 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @09:04PM (#7824519) Journal
    The research quoted in the article seems completely non-ethical to me. The quote from the article below (SA = Scientific American) below discusses possible short-term, and even long-term memory loss in human subjects. Moreover, it was done in the recent past -- within the past twenty years! How can this be ethical?!

    SA: Are there any ways to erase memories by stimulating the brain?

    JM: The dominant evidence that goes back over 50 years is that one can block or certainly reduce memories formed within the past several hours by treating human or animal subjects with electro-convulsive shock. But it's nonselective; whatever happened in that past several hours will be gone. And that's rather gross stimulation applied to the skull. What Larry Squire at UC San Diego has shown is that if human subjects are repeatedly given electro-convulsive shocks (several times a week for several weeks), they will have impaired global memory that goes back many months, but that memory will gradually recover. He did this in the late 1980s.

  • Been there, I think I done that. (Score:3, Funny)

    by dasboy ( 598256 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @10:39PM (#7825036)
    Paycheck-Style Memory Erasure: How Close Are We?

    For me, we are already there:

    1) Get Paycheck
    2) Cash Paycheck at Bar
    3) Drink Paycheck (figuratively, of course)
    4) Voila! Memory Erased.

  • Not possible, here's why... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by borgheron ( 172546 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @11:28PM (#7825291) Homepage Journal
    When a person learns something, this information is stored in the overall structure of the brain. In short the connections between the neurons is what makes up our memories, not the individual neurons themselves.

    It's impossible to tell where memories would be stored and if they are stored, then would a single memory reside in one place in the brain or in multiple places? The current evidence points to the idea that memories are stored in serveral desparate areas of the brain and in no predictable pattern. This means that it would be impossible to tell in each person where the last 24 hours of memories have been stored.

    GJC

  • SQUIDS and the gamma knife (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FuzzyDaddy ( 584528 ) on Monday December 29, 2003 @12:13AM (#7825500) Journal
    With magnetic brain imaging using SQUIDs [216.239.37.104] (which can located brain activity in real time) and gamma knife [uams.edu] technology, which can destroy specific pieces of brain tissue without opening up a person's head, why wouldn't this be possible? We're still at the blunt intrument stage from both the sensor point of view and the neuron destruction point of view, but we're a lot closer than many people may think.

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