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Comment by seclorum | Hacker News Reader

They didn't 'discover the location of memories', they simply discovered that they can trigger a reaction that looks similar to that of the original incident by focusing energy on parts of a mouse brain that were actively stimulated during the incident.

This is Pavlovs dog with optics, not revolutionary science.

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I don't understand your reference to Pavlov's dog, it's more comparable to Penfield's work with stimulation of specific points of the brain. Also the ExtremeTech headline is a bit misleading. The related MIT article is a little more clear that this involves memories in a small cluster of neurons, not one memory per neuron as is implied by the heading above. http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/conjuring-memories-artifi...

Yea -- sorry, I mention later that it's a cluster, but I will update the first paragraph to mention that it's a cluster, not single neurons.

Not revolutionary? It's a relatively small step from here to mapping out the neural pathways which trigger specific memories. If we can figure out those underlying structures, we can hopefully learn how to read and modify them.

I need my Matrix-style brain downloads!

More importantly imagine how many people this could help!

There's a bit of ethics involved, but what if we could simply remove traumatic memories to treat psychological disorders?

Plus, yeah, plugging in to learn karate would be pretty awesome.

You can actually remove traumatic memories using drugs but it has to be done very soon following the traumatic event.

It is in fact an arena of medical ethical conflict between those who advocate it and those who (properly, in my view) don't.

In this day and age, introducing such technology to the world would be an immensely destructive crime against humanity.

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