Wipe your brain
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind features a sleazy doctor who offers a procedure for erasing unwanted memories. The unhappy lovers played by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet decide that it is not enough for them to break up, they must forget each other completely. Carrey goes for the procedure, only to decide that he doesn’t want to erase the memory of their love after all. Eternal Sunshine was another invention of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who had previously offered us tours John Malkovich’s mind. It was clever, but too far out and unlikely to happen in real life.
That was a couple of years ago. Today research in neuroscience is bringing the ‘far out’ much closer to the plausible. According to Benedict Carey in the New York Times, it may soon be possible to edit human memory by controlling a single substance in the brain. Imagine being able to forget your fear of flying, or your addiction to tranquilizers, or that outfit you wore to the Junior-Senior Prom in the 1980s. How can it be done?
Eternal Sunshine of the Partially-Wiped Mind in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
April 13th, 2009 at 13:51
I would certainly not want erasures of any part of my memory, bad, included.
There was this theory by a NY psychoanalyst that our memories become embedded into the DNA – our genes. And that these genes/memories are then carried off into our offsprings. The result: the deja vus, the seeming “I’ve lived this life before, I was a rajah, a countess, etc.”
April 13th, 2009 at 14:38
Loved Eternal Sunshine. First Jim Carrey performance where I wasn’t annoyed.