Nautilus discusses some of the latest trends in “therapeutic” efforts to wipe out parts of memories or re-wire the networks in people’s brains.
How to Unlearn a Disease (Nautilus, May 14, 2015)
Nautilus discusses some of the latest trends in “therapeutic” efforts to wipe out parts of memories or re-wire the networks in people’s brains.
How to Unlearn a Disease (Nautilus, May 14, 2015)
The psychological approaches sound very positive. But I wouldn’t trust the brain interference approaches.
“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.
We are supposed to learn from our mistakes.
Without your memories, who are you?
My family believed in the psychiatric diagnosis given to me, and my family makes the prophecy come true. No one can un-learn that disease.
Losing one’s memories is one of the most traumatizing things one can experience. I can’t understand how some people think it may be therapeutic. “Oh, it’s OK, you don’t remember because we wiped out the memories of you being abused/raped/traumatized.” Yeah, that’s going to work…
The way to address such things is to grow from the pain. “What does not kill you makes you stronger”. Deleting a part of somebody’s life is not an answer is a mutilation.
Am I the only one who finds that creepy and scary?
This is truly terrifying. And anybody who understands the mechanisms of trauma wouldn’t recommend getting rid of the memories. It is not the memory itself that causes such long-lasting effects; it is the worldview and other associations that create difficult behaviors. Without the memory, all that’s left is difficult behaviors that we don’t understand. I don’t trust any of this so-called science; I had a spinal cord stimulator implanted to relieve serious pain, but nobody told me there were other, less invasive alternatives. I eventually had the stimulator removed because it caused its own pain. I also have a dear friend whose DBS made Parkinson’s worse, not better. Very creepy and scary.