http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/08/neurosc...ories-with-dru/

Seriously, though, this stuff has positive medical applications. There are many traumatic experiences that small children would be better off forgetting.

Of course, we all know that as soon as this stuff's been through a few rounds of human testing, global reports of torture and other geneva convention violations will drop off very suddenly....

Interesting.

More details here.

SR tends to be too conservative with a lot of the tech, then go completely over the top with other stuff. It should be trivial by 2060 to figure out how to prevent short term memory from becoming long term memory. Which is something useful to a lot of people for clinical use, but has pretty huge criminal potential too. a "date rape" drug that doesn't turn someone into a zombie but just having no idea exactly what happened the day before with whom, using threats to someones family to get information and then having them all forget it, all sorts of evil stuff.

Its not a very new concept. Benzos have been routinely used for decades to induce anterograde amnesia during surgical anesthesia.

Because losing the bits of your memories that give you a yardstick to measure how horrible the world is will be a wonderful way to leave you well equipped to deal with real life. I'd also call it child abuse if it's performed on a child below the age of consent.

Maybe I have a strange perspective, but my family has a friend who cannot work because he has no stress tolerance whatsoever - mostly thanks to sheltering parents that never exposed him to stress as a child. I am not going to fall victim to the belief that things that happen to kids reduces them to shattered wrecks instead of creating them an awareness of the rigours of the world and mechanisms to deal with such things.

When older adults says that something is character building, they're no peddling bullshit. I'm not saying that human misery is good, but without experiencing it we'd find it a hell of a lot more difficult to function in a world that's as horrible as the real world. People aren't born with coping mechanisms, they learn them during childhood.

You'd call erasing the memory that they were abused child abuse? That they were abducted?
Interesting....
You DO have a strange perspective.
I'm not saying remove all 'stress' but just the major life shattering disasters

alcohol and other "entertainment" drugs do nicely there already. know more then one person thats highly worried about what they did on some party as the amount of alcohol basically caused a blackout...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7943906.stm

Watching your father turned to chunky salsa by a suicide bomber when you're three years old can mess you up pretty badly. And then we get to certain ex-employees of the Vatican.....

A "life shattering disaster" that you process and recover from effectively is simply an event, or series of events, that form a part of your background. You've managed to surpass the events and understand it properly in context. How many men and women these days have recovered from terrible events and gone on to be productive members of society? Can you say that they're not as well adjusted as, or even better adjusted than, people who experience no misery at all?

That is why I advocate restricting this technique to cases where the memories of an event completely cripple your ability to function in society with no realistic hope of recovery. First we need to attempt to help the victims effectively process the events and regard them as something they cannot change. If they are too badly affected to ever be rescued by less extreme measures, then (and only then) should we consider erasing the memories.

I don't see it as particularly weird to consider tearing out a bit of their history and self-identity an extreme solution to problems that we have already made inroads into. Amnesia is considered a disorder, and periods of memory loss are considered a significant symptom. Doing this to children where other options are still possible, or on a whim, should be considered abuse for the same reason we consider surgical practice without reason an abuse.


Your statement was that there were "many" cases where children would be "better off forgetting" events they've witnessed. That was the grounds for the first sentence or two. Where I explained why some events that probably fall into your "better off forgetting" classification may be beneficial to experience. I based my post on the assumption that you would recognise it as criticism of the practice you advocated in your post. That would be why my second paragraph made mention of someone who was protected from stressful, annoying events and has had his ability to live a normal, socially productive, life impaired as a result.

You've misread my words, even as I may have misread yours. Certainly, I appear to have a different set of assumptions about the word "many" and "traumatic" to you. The media has a tendancy, in my experience, to declare events with the slightest risk of children, their parents, or even their pets dying a "traumatic" and "harrowing" experience. The meaning of "many" is subjective and varies widely by the region of your origin.

I assumed your statement meant that you felt that a large number of events that normal, productive adults experienced as part of their childhood would be better off forgotten. This is, as I have said, likely to be a misunderstanding. That was what lead to me asserting that I would consider such a practice child abuse. Clearly you meant different, assuming that the case you chose to defend your position was the least extreme case where you feel it is warranted, instead of a misleading and fallacious argument for justifying the use in everyday cases on the basis of benefit in extreme cases.

Yes, but this would be reliable and repeatable, without the nasty side effects of them ODing or them deciding to sing Karaoke or barfing all over you. And with a much smaller, easy to administer dose.

Just why do i know about this drug from an Boston legal Episode i watched some months ago?