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Comment by willvarfar | Hacker News Reader

> Researchers then used light beamed into the brain to control the activity of individual neurons - they could literally switch memories on or off.

So can this be extended to movie-plot-like memories be wiped, or false memories implanted? How did they identify the memories to be targeted and where they were stored?

There's lots of exciting work to reverse-engineer and extract rules from software neural nets. Can the same be possible in hardware nets too, or will attempting to measure it interfere and distort it?

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You might be interested in this

http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-figured-out-how-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_erasure

> So can this be extended to movie-plot-like memories be wiped, or false memories implanted? How did they identify the memories to be targeted and where they were stored?

The same group has done all that stuff with optogenetics and molecular techniques:

http://tonegawalab.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/296_Li...

http://tonegawalab.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/297_Ra...

http://tonegawalab.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/289_li...

In the article I thought it said they monitored the brain for any activity in response to the shock and the neurons that activated were assumed to be the associated in response to the memory. This is a far cry from being able to look at a neuron in situ and saying what memory or memories are associated with that neuron.

This is an old article and may be superceded by more recent research but false memories may not have to be implanted, in some sense we do it ourselves every time we recall a memory http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-our-brains-...

A more practical use might be found in psychotherapy - recalling traumatic memories to identify the relevant neurons and then switching them off. That could be extremely useful for treating PTSD if it's feasible to do so.

"The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is [SPOILER ALERT] a movie about erasing the memories of a past lover, a very similar idea.

You might want to read about EMDR therapy. I believe any attempt to overcome the effects of traumatic experiences requires reactivating those neurons at least temporarily. I feel like even the use of CBT to change behavior works better if you can associate the unwanted behavior with memories of how you came to acquire that behavior - at that point you'll want to change the narrative of the old events to something that can be more easily accepted. This isn't really new.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338337/

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