Memory Engineering

View 715 Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Memory Engineering

Memory Engineering

Jerry,

This is, I think, quite important – a theory of how memory works that includes techniques for modifying and/or erasing specific memories, using currently available neurochemicals, with considerable evidence that it works. There are interesting implications.

Apparently long-term memory involves destructive reads – recalling a long-term memory automatically rewrites it, modified to some extent to reflect your current mental state. (Anyone who’s looked into witness unreliability over time says, "ah-hah!")

There are therapeutic implications: Recalling a traumatic memory while in a positive mental state (however induced) can reshape the memory and reduce the trauma.

There are terrifying implications: Recalling a memory while dosed with a blocker for an essential memory (re)formation neurochemical erases that memory.

They’ve tested it on rats, so far. It requires direct injection of the blocker chemical into the brain, so far. It works quite well to erase specific rat memories, so far.

We live in interesting times. (Uh, what were we talking about?)

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/all/1

Henry

A very long time ago during the height of the child molestation witch hunts I did considerable research into the then state of the art on inducing and implanting memories, including interviews with the psychologist involved in implanting a false memory of a child having been encountered by the judge in a case then on trial – the child had never met the judge except in the courtroom nor had she ever been at the place at which the incident supposedly took place.

The incident story was deliberately kept non-traumatic since there were considerable ethical issues at stake, and of course it only proved suggestibility, not that the charge in the case (against her father; it was a divorce case) was untrue or implanted. On the other hand, at the time the general consensus of the child psychologists were that children didn’t really have false memories and weren’t all that subject to suggestion.

That of course is untrue. Any parent can induce false memories in their own children. “Remember that time when you were lost and the nice policeman gave you a lollipop?” Said to a 12 year old about in incident that supposedly took place at age 5, the first response will be “No, I don’t remember that,” but gentle reminding will often make the incident real enough that the child will remember details, such as whether the policemen was in uniform or not, or “It wasn’t a real policeman, he was a mall cop!” or some such. Again there are ethical concerns here, but it is very possible for authority figures to induce children and even grownups to “recover” childhood memories of incidents that never happened, and there is at least one record of an adult recovering a memory of being molested by a person dead at the time of the supposed incident.

Psychology consultants in divorces cases have often ‘recovered’ childhood memories of molestations or questionable events that almost certainly never happened.

I would not be at all surprised to discover that chemical and physical stimulations can be included in a program of memory engineering, since I know that it’s quite possible to change memories or implant false memories without drugs. Memory engineering is one of the dirty little secrets known to some trial lawyers and many police interrogators. It is a major reason for changing police procedures in lineups and other identification processes of eye witnesses.

We have known since Aristotle that perception consists of inputs from the real world as modified by our internal perception processes, and that memories can be false. Unfortunately that is often the best we have for law enforcement: after all, some memories can be quite true.

See also “Mad in America”

http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-are-diagnosed-as-mentally-ill/

In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by (1) how many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians, and (2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not.

Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not.

Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the United States. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologized and medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most oppressive authorities.

Of course the Soviet Union used to put those who rejected the self evident scientific proof of Marxism in madhouses. When I was a young geeky nerd there were no “ADHD” diagnoses, Mania as a diagnosis had a fairly precise symptomatic definition and in any event there were not many “mental health professionals” around, and there were no drugs to be administered by nurses. Drugging children was a big deal, and it never happened to me. I learned discipline and self control, and particularly how to at least pretend to respect authorities such as the teacher who clearly knew less about scientific subjects than I had learned from the Encyclopedia. I probably would have escaped drugging because my mother was a rugged individualist and my father was a member of the Odd Fellows Society, but one can never be sure.

I understand that there are cases in which Ritalin is useful for some children in some circumstances. I refuse to believe that it is appropriate for any great percentage of the adolescent population without considerably more evidence than I have ever encountered.

When I was in graduate school in psychology I was considered acceptable as an experimentalist and theorist, but since I questioned much of the evidence for the effectiveness of most of the techniques used in clinical psychology – I found Freud’s theories no more based on real world evidence than those of L Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, and considerably less useful in understanding the world than General Semantics – but then I wasn’t intending to start a psychology practice. That led me to a number of disagreements with the clinical teachers. Then Paul Horst taught us to doubt the mathematical competence of most experimental psychologists as well, narrowing my niche in academic psychology. Fortunately I was recommended to Boeing and hired to work in Human Factors so I never had to choose an academic career. I find Dr. Levine’s essay refreshing.

It’s lunch time, and I have to work on Black Ship Island after lunch, but I do have some other stuff for later. I am still in recovery from the bronchial distress, and it still tires me more than it should.