Submission #12: What are the implications of being able to erase memories?

            I watched a movie several years ago called “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” which is a 2004 American romantic science-fiction comedy-drama movie. The summary of this movie is as follows: After a painful breakup, Clementine undergoes a procedure to erase memories of her former boyfriend Joel from her mind. When Joel discovers that Clementine is going to extremes to forget their relationship, he undergoes the same procedure and slowly begins to forget the woman that he loved. This movie explores the implications of trying to erase memories, even ones that seem bad in the moment. In the movie, while Joel is getting his memories erased, he relives them and realizes that he doesn’t want to completely forget Clementine; he wants some memories to remember her by. I came across a very interesting article when I was looking for more information on this movie (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-06/02/restoring-memories). It is about in 2014, when scientists reported that they’d successfully manipulated mice’s memories, or at least the emotions associated with those memories. We form the informational part of our memories—the facts and events—in the hippocampus of our brain. The emotions connected to them—how we feel about those facts and events—are stored in the amygdale. Scientists messed with these mice’s amygdale and basically reversed how they “felt” about prior lab experiences, changing an unpleasant event into a pleasant one, and vice versa. Then, the scientists were quick to point out that while this could be useful in erasing a person’s negative emotions about something in their past (PTSD, for example), it would be a bad idea to actually make them forget that these events had happened because they would be losing important memories.

            The main reason people would want to erase any bad memories is because they don’t want to remember any tough time in their lives. However, it is these tough times that help us grow, we experience these hardships and learn from them. If we were to completely erase it, we would be creating holes in our growth. For example, on an extreme level, let’s say that you wanted to erase all your memories of high school because they were the worst four years of your life; okay so you do, wouldn’t you then also lose all your knowledge that you gained from school those years? You would forget geometry, algebra, biology etc. Wouldn’t this then be a regression? Also, let’s say you need to later remember something that happened during high school, you wouldn’t be able to. Memories are the building blocks to our knowledge; you need to be very careful when trying to move even one, because everything could be disturbed.