Eternal Sunshine of the Curious Mind

You know what RadioLab is good for? Inspiration.

This morning I listened to one of their podcasts called “Memory and Forgetting” and it was an extremely interesting hour of radio. In it they talk about how it becomes possible to erase memories and create them. It was an interesting concept because it makes me wonder what I would personally erase, if anything.

At first I was a bit sceptical as to whether it was actually possible to do something like this, but then they mention an experiment with rats. They got rats and sounded a buzzer at random points before then shocking the rats, making rats associate the buzzer with being electrical shocks. They notice the rat’s reactions physically, i/e bracing itself for the shock. What they do to erase the memory is inject the rat with a drug immediately after the buzzer, meaning that they are injecting the rat whilst it is preparing itself for a shock, i/e remember the association. The next time they sounded the buzzer, the rat did precisely nothing before being shocked. It had forgotten the association because of this drug.

It was speculated that this actually fully erased the memory of the rat, rather than simply erasing that specific memory, so what they do is they do two different buzzers, both still sending an electric shock into the rat, but now it associates two different sounds with being shocked. After a while they decide to sound one buzzer, then inject the rat in a similar way to before. The exact same thing happens, the next time it doesn’t remember. They then sound the other alarm but the rat shows the physical signs related to that shock, meaning that they successfully erased the memory association of the first buzzer to being shocked without effecting other memories.

They can also create memories by getting a subject to talk about certain people and experiences, seeing how the brain reacts to each word and then somehow creating a memory from that, usually of getting lost in a shopping centre as a young child.



Eternal Sunshine of the Spotland Mind (2004)



In a way it’s not too dissimilar to the film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” where Jim Carrey’s character gets his memory erased of his former girlfriend (Kate Winslet), and you go through the journey with him as he is gradually losing his memory.



It does make you wonder if you would volunteer to get anything erased.  They give examples of someone being raped and several other similar types of memories and in that sense, I think it would be a good thing as you could easily erase traumatic events of your life. However, it’s not something I would do.





I have had a lot of events in my life which still haunt me today,  stuff like losing friends (mainly through my own fault), getting run over when I was 4/5 years old, and stuff like that. Despite that, I would not get my memory erased of these events, they have made me who I am today. Without these memories I could easily not have gone on to do things in my life that I am proud of, or make friends that I have made. For example, if I hadn’t stopped being friends with Faye in April 2002, I would never have become friends with Marinda.

It’s very similar in a way to how I have spent most of my life having a body image issue (but not anymore though) as up until July sort of time, I had always had a specific thing I wanted to change about my body. Now, I’m not going to mention what the thing is (although obviously some of you already know what it is) but whenever I was asked would I have preferred to have been born that way (i/e being born with my body being the way I want it to be now), I always say no. Had I been born that way then I wouldn’t have made the same friends I have now, I wouldn’t have had the same experiences growing up (either positive or negative) and I’m always of the belief that is effectively “better the devil you know.”