Friday, October 31, 2008

Military interest in memory manipulation as means of treating PTSD

Great the mice can forget but one thing I doubt the researchers are thinking about is the soul and emotions. Do mice have souls? Do they love and regret? Do they have a conscience? Do they pray to God? If the memory is erased after the trauma, after the trauma touches the soul, what happens then? Do they no longer remember the event and thus find no reason for feeling the way they do? What do they do when this happens? How do you heal something when you can't remember it? For all the talk about the troops and faith, it really is strange they wouldn't think of any of this and understand that this could be a very bad thing to do.

Military investigates amnesia beams

Military interest in memory manipulation as means of treating PTSD.


By David Hambling
A team of scientists from the United States and China announced last week that, for the first time, they had found a means of selectively and safely erasing memories in mice, using the signaling molecule αCaMKII. It's a big step forward, and one that will be of considerable interest to the military, which has devoted efforts to memory manipulation as a means of treating post-traumatic stress disorder. But some military research has moved in another direction entirely.

In the 1980s, researchers found that even low-level exposure to a beam of electrons caused rats to forget what had just happened to them (an effect known as retrograde amnesia — the other version, anteretrograde amnesia, is when you can't form new memories). The same effect was also achieved with X-rays. The time factor was not large — it only caused memory loss about the previous four seconds — but the effect was intriguing.
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