KEY POINTS:
If you could take a pill that would eliminate your most painful memory, would you take it?
Perhaps not, if you were thinking about the break-up of your marriage or the death of a parent. Most of us feel that no matter how painful, those experiences are part of what defines us.
But what if that memory was of accidentally shooting innocent civilians in a war, an experience that had caused your life to almost stop functioning?
Or would you answer differently if you could offer an injection that would dull, or even erase, the trauma for your pre-school child who had been violently raped?
This is no real-time rerun of Jim Carey and Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the film where two lovers choose to have the memory of their relationship erased from their brains. This science is real. It even has a fairly Orwellian name, "therapeutic forgetting".
Researchers may have found a way to dilute, block or even remove unwanted memories with "amnesia" drugs, like a morning-after pill for the brain. Studies at several North American universities have found that Propranolol, a drug originally developed to treat heart disease and migraines, can inhibit stress associated with specific memories, not only six hours after the trauma but more remarkably, even decades after the event.
Though the research is only in its infancy, a Harvard scientist has had success treating study volunteers culled from hospital emergency rooms suffering from Post Traumatic Stress. And researchers at McGill University found that soldiers still affected from incidents dating back 30 years were helped profoundly when given Propranolol while recalling the memory.
More daunting still, scientists at New York University have found a way to seemingly eliminate a specific memory entirely - at least in rats. After giving the animals another beta-blocking drug called U0126, the rats were no longer afraid of the first of two musical notes they had learned to associate with an electric shock. The memory of that shock was gone when tested against the fear that still remained for the second musical note, when no amnesia drug was administered.
Who can argue against alleviating acute suffering? Mental pain is surely as profound as physical pain in many cases. The intentions of the researchers undertaking this work are just as noble as the doctors after World War I who pioneered plastic surgery to reconstruct horrific facial injuries of veterans.
But consider where that line of science has taken us decades later. Our face used to be a no-trespass marker of our individuality. No one then would have dreamed that we can try on a new nose or breast today, updating ourselves by the decade if we choose.
Like our face or figure just one generation ago, today we see our memories as a sacrosanct, untouchable piece of who we are. But will we begin to sculpt away our painful remembrances at whim like any other form of self-renewal?
Scientists in the field argue that we already medicate away unhappiness for depression and schizophrenia. There is certainly nothing society enhancing about ignoring that very real pain. Why draw a line in the sand now?
For starters, date rape drugs represent only the tip of the iceberg. The potential for abuse on a societal scale is daunting. Soldiers could be given drugs directly after a battle to turn them into more psychologically manageable fighting machines. And would the horrific nature of war itself, or any crime against humanity, be forever obscured by dulling the mental anguish of its victims?
Any victim, even an abused child, would be even less likely to testify or simply seek justice as an adult if the pain of their suffering is blunted. Apply that to society as a whole and you've got a Kafka novel.
It seems laughable that we would ever ingest a pill to erase the memory of a job loss, or a bad date. But similarly, no one intended that by helping childless couples conceive, it would lead to women in India incubating babies in their womb for a price today.
When we choose to deaden unwanted memories, will we also be deadening the future of collective empathy? Take a chill pill and it will all be forgotten. Choose to retain the trauma and you're responsible for your own madness.
One small step for man may lead to a giant question mark for mankind. It is probably inevitable that science will provide us with memory erasers in the future. But we don't have to watch it happen with our eyes wide shut.
What we should remember in that noble race to cure is that our pain sometimes has a purpose. It is the seed of our conscience.
www.traceybarnett.co.nz
