Blanks for the Memories

Are we fast approaching an "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" moment?

On one level this is quite interesting but on another it's pretty damn scary.

From CBS News...



And an interview with Oxford University neuroethicist Anders Sandberg from Wired...

Wired.com: I've asked about memory removal — but should the discussion involve adding memories, too?

Sandberg: People are more worried about deletion. We have a preoccupation with amnesia, and are more fearful of losing something than adding falsehoods.

The problem is that it's the falsehoods that really mess you up. If you don't know something, you can look it up, remedy your lack of information. But if you believe something falsely, that might make you act much more erroneously.

You can imagine someone modifying their memories of war to make them look less cowardly and more brave. Now they'll think they're a brave person. At that point, you end up with the interesting question of whether, in a crisis situation, they would now be brave.

Wired.com: Is it paranoid to worry that someday people will be stuck drifting in a sea of shifting and unreliable memories?

Sandberg: I think we're already in this sea, but we don't notice it most of the time. Most people think, "I've got a slightly bad memory." Then they completely trust what they remember, even when it's completely unreliable.

Maybe all this is good, because it forces us to recognize that the nature of our memory is quite changeable.

I have no doubt that certain things I "remember" did not in fact occur at the time or as I remember them. For example, for some reason I attribute a lot of events in my early years to when I was 11 but there is no way that these various events all occurred in that one year.

Erasing memories is a scary proposition but in a sense we erase memories all the time...we just don't remember what we've forgotten. Therein lies the rub.