Post by Merkuri on Apr 5, 2004 11:39:46 GMT -5
"Is there a risk of brain damage?" "Technically, the procedure is brain damage." -- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
What if you could take a drug soon after a traumatic experience and have your memory of that experience dulled or eliminated? Would you do it? Are memories one of those things that make us who we are, even the traumatic ones? Would choosing to forget something prevent you from learning from the experience and make you into a different person?
There's a drug in testing right now to do just that.
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[From the NYTimes (free registration required): www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/magazine/04MEMORY.html ]
[The article is too long to paste it in its entirety, so here's the first couple pages.]
The Quest to Forget
By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
Published: April 4, 2004
A 29-year-old paralegal was lying in the middle of Congress Street in downtown Boston after being run over by a bicycle messenger, and her first thought was whether her skirt was hiking up. ''Oh, why did I wear a skirt today?'' she asked herself. ''Are these people all looking at my underpants?''
Her second thought was whether she would be hit by one of the cars speeding down Congress -- she wasn't aware that other pedestrians had gathered around, some of them directing traffic away from her. And her third thought was of a different trauma, eight years earlier, when driving home one night, she was sitting at a red light and found herself confronted by an armed drug addict, who forced his way into her car, made her drive to an abandoned building and tried to rape her.
''I had a feeling that this one trauma, even though it was a smaller thing, would touch off all sorts of memories about that time I was carjacked,'' said the woman, whose name is Kathleen. She worried because getting over that carjacking was something that had taken Kathleen a long time. ''For eight months at least,'' she said, ''every night before I went to bed, I'd think about it. I wouldn't be able to sleep, so I'd get up, make myself a cup of decaf tea, watch something silly on TV to get myself out of that mood. And every morning I'd wake up feeling like I had a gun against my head.''
Would Kathleen have been better off if she had been able to wipe out the memory of the attack rather than spending months seeing a psychologist and avoiding the intersection where the carjacking occurred? The answer seems straightforward: if you can ease the agony that people like Kathleen suffer by dimming the memory of their gruesome experiences, why wouldn't you? But some bioethicists would argue that Kathleen should hold on to her nightmarish memory and work through it, using common methods like psychotherapy, cognitive behavior therapy or antidepressants. Having survived the horror is part of what makes Kathleen who she is, they say, and blunting its memory would diminish her and keep her from learning from the experience, not to mention impair her ability to testify against her assailant should the chance arise.
Scientists who work with patients who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder see the matter quite differently. As a result, they are defending and developing a new science that can be called therapeutic forgetting. True post-traumatic stress can be intractable and does not tend to respond to most therapies. So these scientists are bucking the current trend in memory research, which is to find a drug or a gene that will help people remember. They are, instead, trying to help people forget.
All of us have done things in our lives we'd rather not have done, things that flood us with remorse or pain or embarrassment whenever we call them to mind. If we could erase them from our memories, would we? Should we? Questions like these go to the nature of remembrance and have inspired films like ''Memento'' and, most recently, ''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,'' in which two ex-lovers pay to erase their memories of each other. We are a long way from the day when scientists might be able to zap specific memories right out of our heads, like a neurological neutron bomb, but even the current research in this area ought to make us stop and think. Aren't our memories, both the good and the bad, the things that make us who we are? If we eliminate our troubling memories, or stop them from forming in the first place, are we disabling the mechanism through which people learn and grow and transform? Is a pain-free set of memories an impoverished one?
After her bike-messenger collision, Kathleen was taken to the emergency room of Massachusetts General Hospital. Once her physical wounds were attended to -- she wasn't badly hurt; just a few cuts and bruises -- she was approached by Anna Roglieri Healy, a psychiatric nurse. Healy was engaged in a pilot study to test whether administering drugs immediately after a traumatic event could prevent the development of post-traumatic stress disorder. Did Kathleen want to be part of the study?
''I thought it might be a good idea,'' Kathleen said recently. ''Not that I really thought I'd develop problems after this bike accident, but I knew I was prone to post-traumatic stress disorder because I developed it after my carjacking.''
Kathleen signed on to the study, which was being directed by Roger Pitman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. (Pitman requested that Kathleen's last name not be used for this article because of her status as a research subject.) Like the 40 other subjects, she took a blue pill four times a day for a week and a half and then gradually reduced the dosage over the course of another nine days -- a total of 19 days of treatment. Half of the subjects were taking an inert placebo pill and half were taking propranolol, which interferes with the action of stress hormones in the brain.
When stress hormones like adrenaline and norepinephrine are elevated, new memories are consolidated more firmly, which is what makes the recollection of emotionally charged events so vivid, so tenacious, so strong. If these memories are especially bad, they take hold most relentlessly, and a result can be the debilitating flashbacks of post-traumatic stress disorder. Interfering with stress hormone levels by giving propranolol soon after the trauma, according to Pitman's hypothesis, could keep the destructive memories from taking hold. He doesn't expect propranolol to affect nonemotional memories, which don't depend on stress hormones for their consolidation, but he said it could possibly interfere with the consolidation of highly emotional positive memories as well as negative ones.
Pitman's hypothesis, if it is confirmed experimentally, might lead to a basic shift in our understanding of remembering and forgetting, allowing us someday to twist and change the very character of what we do and do not recall.
The idea that forgetting could ever be a good thing seems counterintuitive, especially in a culture steeped in fear of Alzheimer's disease. When it comes to memory, most people are looking for ways to have more of it, not less. If you can boost your ability to remember, you can be smarter, ace the SAT's, perform brilliantly in school and on the job, stay sharp far into old age.
But with memory, more is not always better. ''At the extreme,'' James McGaugh, director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California at Irvine, said recently, ''more is worse.''
McGaugh recalled the Jorge Luis Borges short story ''Funes, the Memorious,'' in which Ireneo Funes is thrown from a horse. The injury paralyzes his body and turns his memory into a ''garbage heap.'' Funes remembers everything: ''He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once. . . . The truth was, Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf.''
And yet, as Borges writes, such a prodigious memory is not only not enough -- it is much too much: ''[Funes] had effortlessly learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking. To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there were nothing but particulars -- and they were virtually immediate particulars.''
Most of us are quite capable, sometimes far more capable than we'd like, of forgetting the particulars. Where did you park your car at the train station this morning? What's another word for pretty? What year was the Constitution ratified? So many details seem out of reach, lost in a murky mental morass. But McGaugh has found that certain memories -- the ones associated with the strongest emotions -- tend to stay locked in longer, sometimes for life. You can't possibly remember every time you and your wife kissed, but you probably remember the first time.
[...continued Here (page 3) ]
What if you could take a drug soon after a traumatic experience and have your memory of that experience dulled or eliminated? Would you do it? Are memories one of those things that make us who we are, even the traumatic ones? Would choosing to forget something prevent you from learning from the experience and make you into a different person?
There's a drug in testing right now to do just that.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[From the NYTimes (free registration required): www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/magazine/04MEMORY.html ]
[The article is too long to paste it in its entirety, so here's the first couple pages.]
The Quest to Forget
By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
Published: April 4, 2004
A 29-year-old paralegal was lying in the middle of Congress Street in downtown Boston after being run over by a bicycle messenger, and her first thought was whether her skirt was hiking up. ''Oh, why did I wear a skirt today?'' she asked herself. ''Are these people all looking at my underpants?''
Her second thought was whether she would be hit by one of the cars speeding down Congress -- she wasn't aware that other pedestrians had gathered around, some of them directing traffic away from her. And her third thought was of a different trauma, eight years earlier, when driving home one night, she was sitting at a red light and found herself confronted by an armed drug addict, who forced his way into her car, made her drive to an abandoned building and tried to rape her.
''I had a feeling that this one trauma, even though it was a smaller thing, would touch off all sorts of memories about that time I was carjacked,'' said the woman, whose name is Kathleen. She worried because getting over that carjacking was something that had taken Kathleen a long time. ''For eight months at least,'' she said, ''every night before I went to bed, I'd think about it. I wouldn't be able to sleep, so I'd get up, make myself a cup of decaf tea, watch something silly on TV to get myself out of that mood. And every morning I'd wake up feeling like I had a gun against my head.''
Would Kathleen have been better off if she had been able to wipe out the memory of the attack rather than spending months seeing a psychologist and avoiding the intersection where the carjacking occurred? The answer seems straightforward: if you can ease the agony that people like Kathleen suffer by dimming the memory of their gruesome experiences, why wouldn't you? But some bioethicists would argue that Kathleen should hold on to her nightmarish memory and work through it, using common methods like psychotherapy, cognitive behavior therapy or antidepressants. Having survived the horror is part of what makes Kathleen who she is, they say, and blunting its memory would diminish her and keep her from learning from the experience, not to mention impair her ability to testify against her assailant should the chance arise.
Scientists who work with patients who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder see the matter quite differently. As a result, they are defending and developing a new science that can be called therapeutic forgetting. True post-traumatic stress can be intractable and does not tend to respond to most therapies. So these scientists are bucking the current trend in memory research, which is to find a drug or a gene that will help people remember. They are, instead, trying to help people forget.
All of us have done things in our lives we'd rather not have done, things that flood us with remorse or pain or embarrassment whenever we call them to mind. If we could erase them from our memories, would we? Should we? Questions like these go to the nature of remembrance and have inspired films like ''Memento'' and, most recently, ''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,'' in which two ex-lovers pay to erase their memories of each other. We are a long way from the day when scientists might be able to zap specific memories right out of our heads, like a neurological neutron bomb, but even the current research in this area ought to make us stop and think. Aren't our memories, both the good and the bad, the things that make us who we are? If we eliminate our troubling memories, or stop them from forming in the first place, are we disabling the mechanism through which people learn and grow and transform? Is a pain-free set of memories an impoverished one?
After her bike-messenger collision, Kathleen was taken to the emergency room of Massachusetts General Hospital. Once her physical wounds were attended to -- she wasn't badly hurt; just a few cuts and bruises -- she was approached by Anna Roglieri Healy, a psychiatric nurse. Healy was engaged in a pilot study to test whether administering drugs immediately after a traumatic event could prevent the development of post-traumatic stress disorder. Did Kathleen want to be part of the study?
''I thought it might be a good idea,'' Kathleen said recently. ''Not that I really thought I'd develop problems after this bike accident, but I knew I was prone to post-traumatic stress disorder because I developed it after my carjacking.''
Kathleen signed on to the study, which was being directed by Roger Pitman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. (Pitman requested that Kathleen's last name not be used for this article because of her status as a research subject.) Like the 40 other subjects, she took a blue pill four times a day for a week and a half and then gradually reduced the dosage over the course of another nine days -- a total of 19 days of treatment. Half of the subjects were taking an inert placebo pill and half were taking propranolol, which interferes with the action of stress hormones in the brain.
When stress hormones like adrenaline and norepinephrine are elevated, new memories are consolidated more firmly, which is what makes the recollection of emotionally charged events so vivid, so tenacious, so strong. If these memories are especially bad, they take hold most relentlessly, and a result can be the debilitating flashbacks of post-traumatic stress disorder. Interfering with stress hormone levels by giving propranolol soon after the trauma, according to Pitman's hypothesis, could keep the destructive memories from taking hold. He doesn't expect propranolol to affect nonemotional memories, which don't depend on stress hormones for their consolidation, but he said it could possibly interfere with the consolidation of highly emotional positive memories as well as negative ones.
Pitman's hypothesis, if it is confirmed experimentally, might lead to a basic shift in our understanding of remembering and forgetting, allowing us someday to twist and change the very character of what we do and do not recall.
The idea that forgetting could ever be a good thing seems counterintuitive, especially in a culture steeped in fear of Alzheimer's disease. When it comes to memory, most people are looking for ways to have more of it, not less. If you can boost your ability to remember, you can be smarter, ace the SAT's, perform brilliantly in school and on the job, stay sharp far into old age.
But with memory, more is not always better. ''At the extreme,'' James McGaugh, director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California at Irvine, said recently, ''more is worse.''
McGaugh recalled the Jorge Luis Borges short story ''Funes, the Memorious,'' in which Ireneo Funes is thrown from a horse. The injury paralyzes his body and turns his memory into a ''garbage heap.'' Funes remembers everything: ''He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once. . . . The truth was, Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf.''
And yet, as Borges writes, such a prodigious memory is not only not enough -- it is much too much: ''[Funes] had effortlessly learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking. To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there were nothing but particulars -- and they were virtually immediate particulars.''
Most of us are quite capable, sometimes far more capable than we'd like, of forgetting the particulars. Where did you park your car at the train station this morning? What's another word for pretty? What year was the Constitution ratified? So many details seem out of reach, lost in a murky mental morass. But McGaugh has found that certain memories -- the ones associated with the strongest emotions -- tend to stay locked in longer, sometimes for life. You can't possibly remember every time you and your wife kissed, but you probably remember the first time.
[...continued Here (page 3) ]
natural talent,, 
