Memory Blockers

Researchers have uncovered a dramatic side-effect to beta-blocking blood pressure drugs: they could be used to selectively block out memories, even traumatic memories:

Cornell University psychiatrists are carrying out tests using beta-blockers, the journal Nature reports. The drug has been shown to interfere with the way the brain stores memories.

Post-traumatic stress disorder affects around one in three of people caught up in such events, and memories can be triggered just by a sound or smell. People with PTSD are given counselling, but because it is not always effective, researchers have been looking for alternative therapies.

However there are concerns that a drug which can alter memories could be misused, perhaps by the military who may want soldiers to become desensitised to violence.

...
Dr Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland and member of the US President's Council on Bioethics expressed concern over the possible uses of the drug.

"If soldiers did something that ended up with children getting killed, do you want to give them beta blockers so that they can do it again?"

He added: "Psychiatrists are once again marching in where angels fear to tread."

Phew... spooky story. The idea that anything and everything must be treated through some kind of chemical drug is spooky, although certainly in many cases chemical therapy is the best solution to the problems [unlike what Tom Cruise would suggest].

But memory is, at lest somewhat, what makes an individual- their experiences, their framework for understanding them. And, pulled further out, collective memories are what begin to make a society. It is part of history- the chronicle of existence. The loss of memory will be the single most manipulable context for the rewriting of history. That's the scary part.

There is no way any American would wish that we did not collectively remember 9/11. It would be foolish. We've barely learned lessons from it as is, and it is constantly invoked for political purposes. An individual may have become so traumatized that they want to pull memories out of their minds [through an event like this, or any other...] but, it just doesn't seem like a good idea.

Spooky.