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Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

This is mildly terrifying. Imagine a drug that penetrates the blood-brain barrier and inhibits the interaction of these two proteins. Administered over a long enough period of time, could it erase your memories... effectively, erasing you? Imagine such a thing being used maliciously, by governments against their critics, or as a covert weapon.

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My first thought is someone is going to do these experiments, probably on a prisoner. Then my second thought was death row prisoners being given the choice of a memory wipe or death as some sort of attempt at rehabilitation. I can't yet see half the ways this could go horribly for humanity.

On the other hand knowing how this works we might be able to boost the process and make people super fast learners, that could be really cool.

That kind of thing is what gets you a society with incentives to produce more death-row convictions.

> My first thought is someone is going to do these experiments, probably on a prisoner.

In the animal model, they surgically altered the animals to have an injection cannula placed in their skulls, it's obviously hard to target, so you just install it and run the experiment, then after the experiment, you kill and necropsy the animal to see if it was in the right place after all. If it was you can keep those results, if it wasn't, you throw those results away.

Meanwhile the test is putting them on a rotating platform and shocking their feet on certain platform areas. Then waiting for them to avoid it habitually. Then you inject them. Then you see if they still avoid it.

These guys basically know next to nothing about how memories are formed at this point. Their test is so amazingly cruel while being particularly narrow that you can't actually divine anything useful from it. Except maybe more funding to keep shooting in the dark at these animals expense.

Reminds me of the “forced swim test” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4401172/) being used as a proxy for depressive behavior.

Try this episode of The Outer Limits https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667983/

It explores this theme and it's rather interesting conclusion.

Yes, although, you could just poison and kill anyone as easily already now, so I'm not sure if it's exactly more terrifying or not.

Possibly more humiliating to see an opponent mind be completely wiped out, possibly living the rest of their lives as a vegetable and to need the care of someone. When one is killed for their ideas they become a martyr of sorts.

It is already much easier to turn someone into a vegetable or to mentally incapacitate people

I think if you want terrifying, look for the "Devil's Breath" or Scopolamine. This has been actively used by robbers and can ruin a life forever.

I had (have) a hard time understanding this comment until I got to the "Use in Crime" section.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopolamine#Use_in_crime

The estimate of 50k criminal cases involving scopolamine in Columbia makes it sound mainstream.

Nevertheless: > [...] on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.

I remember seeing a Vice documentary on this drug, but Googling now it seems a lot of doubts about whether this drug has effects like claimed.

Well I don't know. But having tried drugs like Ambien which is a prescribed sleep medicine and it kind of completely removing all filters far, far more than alcohol would when not going to sleep immediately after and then not remembering anything the next day at all I found it plausible for there to exist really scary drugs like that, which would congitively affect you and your personality.

Murder leaves evidence, namely the corpse/vanishing of the victim, which leads to investigations. Usage of a memory-wipe drug could remain totally undiscovered.

On the other hand something like that might also have legitimate medical uses with ptsd treatments.

Maybe you are thinking of Homecoming. The podcast and tv series around this general plot: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homecoming_(TV_series)

It was an idea before Homecoming, and even before this 2015 paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4547388/ But that aspect of Homecoming scripts were probably inspired by the general discussion of possible treatments over the years.

PTSD applies to more than just veterans. They're one of the most prominent discussed class of sufferers of PTSD, but there are victims of crimes, of simply accidents, or of war or terrorism that can also suffer PTSD.

I wonder if there's something in our food and/or environment that effectively does that over long periods of time, ultimately causing some forms of dementia?

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Wonder if something like Dementia might turn out to be something going wrong with this?

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