The Red and Black

Issue date: 4/14/09 Section: Opinions

HAYLEY PETERSON

My friend walked into her father's office in high school and found him slumped over his desk dead, a handgun in his mouth.

It's taken her years of therapy and hundreds of sleepless nights to wash that vision from her memory. But some nights, without warning, she is back in her father's office, his blood on her bare toes, and she wakes up screaming.

Will she ever find peace from that terrifying nightmare? Perhaps.

Doctors have discovered how to delete specific memories, according to a New York Times article. They have developed a drug tested only on animals so far, but researchers are fairly certain it would have similar effects on the human brain.

What if my friend could delete the memory of her father forever? What if we all could cleanse our reveries and purge our nightmares?

Addictions, habits, relationships, fears - any irritant to your rumination - gone.

The question is - how far would we go? Would we delete entire days, weeks, months or years? How about a childhood? High school scars?

There would be a huge market for this kind of drug. One in five soldiers comes home from Iraq haunted so much by memories of war that they fall victim to post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

And it won't be long before you and I think of reasons why we need it, too. It could be a violent rape, an ugly break-up or even a bad dream we want to forget. We could march into the future leaving the doors of our past flung wide open.

But is the deletion of troubling memories worth the manipulation of human experience?

My trouble is, I have never felt more human than when I'm learning to close those doors on the days, months or years that I want to leave behind. It is in those grave moments - when I must lose myself to find myself again - that I feel humbled, strengthened, enlivened.

Perhaps I'm alone in my desire to learn - and remember - the bad with the good. Perhaps we are ready for a memory-altering drug. After all, we take Xanax to forget anxiety, Loritab to forget pain and Ambien to forget consciousness.

Where do we draw the line?

Perhaps we won't set limits, and we will welcome whatever the doctors prescribe. The scientists developing this new drug also have discovered how to strengthen memory. All they need is the right concoction of chemicals mimicking PKMzeta, the molecules that stimulate memory.

If study drugs, such as Adderall, are steroids for students - then PKMzeta in pill form is a steroid for Gods.

We all would be walking encyclopedias, retaining everything upon sight. Reading a book once, it would sear into our brains forever.

Would learning - the necessary application of curiosity, the juncture between consumption and knowing - evaporate into irrelevance?

What kind of people would we be, then? Would we ever question? Would anything be left unknown? Would there be any intrigue left in the world? Would we have a purpose?

These are the questions I asked myself when I read The New York Times. And I hope we never have to answer them.

- Hayley Peterson is the associate news editor for The Red & Black.

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