ZIP is nowhere near ready for human use. First, the compound would have to be made activity-dependent in order to target specific memories. You would also have to find a way to get it to the right spot in the brain without using a needle. People are clamoring to be test subjects anyway. When Sacktor’s study first came out in 2006, people, especially rape survivors, tracked him down, imploring him to eradicate their painful memories. “They were suffering,” he says. “They couldn’t work or have relationships. Some of them wanted everything erased.” They didn’t care that it would also vaporize all they had ever known.
Benevolent Forgetting
If you feel that you’ve heard this story before, there’s a reason. Moviemakers love the idea of erasing memory, and they work a consistent theme: If you try to undo the past, you pay the price. Nader’s research supposedly inspired the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet both pay to have memories of their painful love affair obliterated. Needless to say, it makes them both miserable. But not as miserable as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in Total Recall, from 1990, in which he learns that his real memories have been erased, that his life is a fake, and that his faux wife, played by Sharon Stone, is trying to kill him.
You don’t have to be a rape survivor or a soldier to have memories you would rather forget. For most people, though, unpleasant memories also serve as a guide. Indeed, some fear the consequences of undermining appropriately bad memories—say, allowing a murderer to forget what he did. Members of the President’s Council on Bioethics warn that altering the memory of a violent crime could unleash moral havoc by lifting the repercussions of malice. “Perhaps no one has a greater interest in blocking the painful memory of evil than the evildoer,” their report cautions.
Beyond all this, memory is the essence of who we are. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is difficult to watch as Carrey’s character flails around in confusion and loss. His fear and desperation may be a realistic portrayal of what it would be like to erase your memory: basically, a waking nightmare. Memory is how you know who you are, how you point yourself toward a destination. We already know that people with Alzheimer’s disease do not feel liberated. They feel utterly lost.
Thankfully, Nader and Brunet’s studies suggest much more benevolent possibilities. If he had received reconsolidation therapy, Carrey’s character would not have forgotten Winslet’s. He simply wouldn’t care that much about her anymore. He would be able to look at his failed relationship as if through the wrong end of a telescope. What is on the other side is still visible, but it is tiny and far away.
That is basically what all these scientists hope to do. Nader, Brunet, and Pitman are now expanding their PTSD study with a new, $6.7 million grant from the U.S. Army, looking for drugs that go beyond propranolol. They are increasingly convinced that reconsolidation will prove to be a powerful and practical way to ease traumatic memories. Sacktor also believes that some version of the techniques they apply in the lab will eventually be used to help people. Most recently, LeDoux’s lab has figured out a way to trigger reconsolidation without drugs to weaken memory, simply by carefully timing the sessions of remembering. “The protocol is ridiculously simple,” LeDoux says.
None of these researchers are looking to create brain-zapped, amoral zombies—or even amnesiacs. They are just trying to take control of the messy, fragile biological process of remembering and rewriting and give it a nudge in the right direction. Brunet’s patients remember everything that happened, but they feel a little less tortured by their own pathological powers of recollection. “We’re turning traumatic memories into regular bad memories,” Brunet says. “That’s all we want to do.”
