I sometimes question if my memories are even real… or if I’m missing any.
Like I feel like there are hidden traumas that got wiped by someone, like… trauma that’s even worse than those that I currently remember, or I wonder if the happy memories are perhaps implanted by someone to try to cover up trauma.
I often wonder if I really am me, what if this is all fabricated, what if my name isn’t actually ■■■ and I wasn’t actually born in ■■■■.
Do y’all even trust your current memories? Do you trust that you are who your memories say you are?
P.S. Oh btw, in the past year, I learned about ECT, electro-convulsive therapy that’s used in some cases of severe depression, and one of the side effects is that it apparantly randonly deletes some of your memories… so its partially already here… terrifying…
unlikely most tropes in scifi , is completely suppressing the memories, also any scifi babble often involves brain damage that removes memories.
As others have pointed out, memories are extremely fickle. Fickle enough that I do not think it could be feasible to have any kind of fine-grained control over what to delete or replace. It’d be a bull in a china shop.
I think the only way it could potentially be done safely and properly is with a computer several orders of magnitude more powerful than a human brain, capable of copying the patient’s brain, running all kinds of simulations on it to figure out how to make the exact changes without touching anything else, then writing those changes back to the host. If we’re talking eventually, that could be an eventually, but a very very big eventually.
I think planted memories like total recall vacations are more realistic.
So, memories are pretty malleable, and there are already techniques to influence how people remember things. It’s frightfully easy for a trained interrogator to ask leading questions that cause the interrogatee to alter their own recollections.
I’ll just leave this here and back away slowly…
Good luck to you.
Yeah, I was going to recommend this one too. IMO one of the more realistic depictions of how memory-editing technology would work, at least in terms of what the technical requirements would be. All the inside-the-head stuff was just good cinema, not necessarily realistic.
Still Jim Carey’s best role. This movie wrecks me emotionally every time.
I highly doubt something like a neurolizer could exist, where they can just erase your memory with a flash of light. But methods to erase memories kinda exist now, and they require actually doing things to your brain physically. Like jamming a metal rod up your nose or behind your eye and swirling it around.
And that shit is pretty scary.
Be even scarier if they could implant new ones like Total Recall, Ghost in the Shell, Fallout 4, or the 6th Day. Did it really happen? Are you a robot? Are you a clone? Shit would absolutely break people.
You’ve basically said much of what I was going to!
We know where memories are stored in the brain, physically. The biggest problem with targeting specific memories is simply a matter of working out which neurons are tied to that memory.
We can already, fairly crudely, see roughly where a memory is stored by looking at brain activity when the patient recalls it. We can also directly trigger memory recollection by applying electrodes to the brain during brain surgery.
There’s still massive engineering challenges to overcome to get this to a practical stage, but engineering challenges are usually surmountable. With that in mind, do I think the technology will be doable, ever?
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Technology to erase specific memories - absolutely.
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Technology to replace specific memories with new ones - I suspect yes, but that’ll need some big leaps in our understanding of how memories actually work.
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Technology to do this with just a flash of light - no, probably not.
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yes you can do it and it’s so easy it sometimes happens accidentally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_the_mall_technique
strictly speaking you don’t need machines for it but if there is any that would be rightwing propaganda enterprise
btw did you know that zucc studied psychology? and that research on this would be maybe not the hottest shit by the time he studied, but at least well disseminated?
What if it already exists but you’ve been made to forget about it?
Yeah… that’s what I’m wondering.
I feel kinda anxious about it. I mean, when I learned about ECT, I was like… fuck that… never doing that… don’t wanna forget who my enemies are and then have them manipulate me.
A medical lab controlled case of Rabies, where they make sure it doesn’t actually kill you, would erase all your memories.
No selective memories to erase though, more like just wiping the slate clean, and you’d have to learn to walk, talk, and wipe your ass again.
Highly not recommended, but I bet that’s been secretly tried more than once…
They can‘t make sure it doesn’t kill you or control it. Rabies is essentially fatal. However it would certainly take your memories in death.
There have been a very rare few survivors of it. Very rare indeed, but yeah the survivors ended up losing all their memory.
rabies survivors also have permanent brain damage, memories is a least of thier problems. it would be something like inducing alzheimers, or dementia like symptoms.
Check out Vacuum Flowers by Swanwick
I believe the technology will eventually be implemented, but most likely not as an external device but as part of a neural chip/link/augmentation. We are already heading in that direction, and I’m certain we humans (unless we nuke ourselves out of existence first) will finally get to the stage in which our brains are augmented with the aid of some kind of artificial implant.
And it’s going to happen relatively slowly at first, then faster and faster. And things will fail or will be exploited and yes, one of those side effects might be wiping your memories or screwing up your identity.
Personally I’m not too worried, I don’t think I’ll live long enough to reach that phase let alone be able to afford any modifications to myself. I just hope humankind learns from the absolute mess that is social media and AI today and can see the obvious risks of implementing something like that. Or not. Just let the world burn down
