How Do I Lose My Memory, Safely?

Question by C Erin D: How do I lose my memory, safely?
Too much happened since September. I can’t take it anymore. I just want to forget everything… Is there ANY WAY at all I can lose my memory safely? I don’t want to die.. I just want to forget everything. I know too much about certain things and I just got out of the best relationship ill have, in my whole life. forgetting all of it just sounds like the best plan. i rather forget than get over it. So how do i do this, help me outt.

Best answer:

Answer by Jason B
To my knowledge, there is no safe way to lose your memory. Furthermore, there are no clinical trials or drugs available to civilians to induce the desired effect. My only suggestion is to find something new to occupy your mind, perhaps a new relationship or something similar. Hope you find a way to escape the memories, I right here with ya!

Answer by Vincent
What would your life be like if you could erase certain memories? Maybe you could “forget” about some traumatic event, a deep-seated fear or a relationship gone wrong.

It seems like science fiction, but researchers may be on the verge of making memory erasure a reality.
INSERT DESCRIPTIONFred R. Conrad/The New York Times Dr. Todd C. Sacktor

Dr. Todd C. Sacktor and his team of scientists from SUNY Downstate Medical Center have been able to show how a single dose of an experimental drug can block the ability of an animal’s brain to hold onto specific types of memories.

To read more about Dr. Sacktor’s work, read Benedict Carey’s article, “Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory.”

Dr. Sacktor’s research raises some interesting questions. How will erasing specific memories affect humans? Will this work lead to a treatment to allow us to retain memory longer?

This week, Dr. Sacktor will answer your questions about memory erasure. Please post your questions and comments below, and check back daily for his responses.

In Response to the Ethical Questions
Question

This strikes me as one of those things that could be extremely dangerous if used improperly. Even ignoring the potential illegal uses, allowing people to erase negative memories is a bad idea.

I’m in general disinclined to promote any kind of ignorance – even if that ignorance would make a person happier. We learn from the past, right? Well, we’re supposed to. And sometimes it is learning from painful memories that we become better people.

The only time I can imagine this being okay is in cases of serious, horrendous trauma – rape victims who now cannot live normal lives, child abuse victims, etc. Only in situations where a person has been completely destroyed from an experience, where there is nothing positive to learn.
But even then, we are denying reality, denying life. And for better or worse, our memories define who we are.

— James W., Washington D.C.
Answer

Dr. Sacktor: The purpose of our experiment with ZIP was to try to understand the molecular basis of memory storage, which previously was a complete scientific mystery. The experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that memories are stored by the action of a specific molecule— PKMzeta. You should know that the notion that a specific molecule stores memory goes completely against the grain of how most neuroscientists have thought about long-term memory for decades. Most neuroscientists thought that memories were stored by anatomical changes in the brain, such as new synapses, not by specific molecules. That is why our results showing a very rapid disruption of long-term memories, first published in Science in 2006, were so striking. The results have been confirmed in many labs around the world, with different drugs that inhibit PKMzeta, and for many different forms of long-term memory. Interestingly, ZIP does not affect short-term memory, or once the drug is gone, the formation of new long-term memories in the same brain region.

Elucidating the molecular mechanism of long-term memory may one day be key, I hope, to developing treatments of memory disorders. But don’t forget how long this development from basic science discovery to clinical usefulness takes— decades for even the most important findings, such as germ theory and the structure of DNA.

One important recent publication by my colleagues at SUNY Downstate, Drs. Sue Mirra, John Crary, and Charles Shao, is that PKMzeta is bound up in the neurofibrillary tangles that are found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s Disease. This is likely to alter the function of PKMzeta and may contribute to the memory loss characteristic of that disorder.

But I think that the concerns, even the deep unease, that many of the questions voice reflect two striking features of the experiments with ZIP that go to the essence of PKMzeta’s role in memory— features that are also rather surprising to most neuroscientists. These are, first, the rapidity with which long-term memories, three month-old in the rats and presumably decades-old in humans, might be erased. This happens almost immediately with the injection of the drug. Second, is the specificity. As I mentioned, short-term memory, the underlying structure of the brain, and the capacity to form new long-term memories are unaffected.

These two surprising features are because PKMzeta is an enzyme. If you recall from high-school biology, there are two general forms of proteins, structural and enzymatic. Most neuroscientists had assumed that hundreds of structural proteins would be involved in the new synapses thought to store long-term memory. And there would be nothing unique to the structural proteins in the memory-storing synapses, as opposed to those synapses formed in development prior to experience.

But enzymes catalyze very specific chemical reactions and can be rapidly inhibited. That long-term memories are maintained by the constant actio