Tweet
This article is too long and digressively personal, but it poses an interesting question from a recent study:
Imagine you’re the manager of a café. It stays open late and the neighbourhood has gone quiet by the time you lock the doors. You put the evening’s earnings into a bank bag, tuck that into your backpack, and head home. It’s a short walk through a poorly lit park. And there, next to the pond, you realise you’ve been hearing footsteps behind you. Before you can turn around, a man sprints up and stabs you in the stomach. When you fall to the ground, he kicks you, grabs your backpack, and runs off. Fortunately a bystander calls an ambulance which takes you, bleeding and shaken, to the nearest hospital.
The emergency room physician stitches you up and tells you that, aside from the pain and a bit of blood loss, you’re in good shape. Then she sits down and looks you in the eye. She tells you that people who live through a traumatic event like yours often develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The condition can be debilitating, resulting in flashbacks that prompt you to relive the trauma over and over. It can cause irritation, anxiety, angry outbursts and a magnified fear response. But she has a pill you can take right now that will decrease your recall of the night’s events – and thus the fear and other emotions associated with it – and guard against the potential effects of PTSD without completely erasing the memory itself.
Would you like to try it?
The emergency room physician stitches you up and tells you that, aside from the pain and a bit of blood loss, you’re in good shape. Then she sits down and looks you in the eye. She tells you that people who live through a traumatic event like yours often develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The condition can be debilitating, resulting in flashbacks that prompt you to relive the trauma over and over. It can cause irritation, anxiety, angry outbursts and a magnified fear response. But she has a pill you can take right now that will decrease your recall of the night’s events – and thus the fear and other emotions associated with it – and guard against the potential effects of PTSD without completely erasing the memory itself.
Would you like to try it?
The essay also touches on the general malleability of memory but fails to make what I think is a significant connection to the above scenario. That is, we fear a loss of personal identity in the idea of erasing our memories, but a lot of neuroscience has shown that our memories are not literal reconstructions of our past. We build and rebuild them over time, and that shapes who we are and think of ourselves, but any present memory you have may not be an accurate recollection of anything in your past (especially the traumatic ones). In that case, if you erase it, are you really erasing a part of yourself, or are you just clearing out this weird gunk your brain produces which you've enshrined as significant?
) my first blackout due to being drunk - it took me until next day evening to find out how I went home, which was quite worrying.
Comment