Categories
- Art (356)
- Other (3,632)
- Philosophy (2,814)
- Psychology (4,018)
- Society (1,010)
Recent Questions
- Why did everyone start to hate the Russians if the U.S. did the same thing in Afghanistan, Iraq?
- What needs to be corrected in the management of Russia first?
- Why did Blaise Pascal become a religious man at the end of his life?
- How do I know if a guy likes you?
- When they say "one generation", how many do they mean?
Of course, there were such attempts, although this is not exactly about the device.
About the first such experiment (and the most remarkable one) I heard on a Radiolab program where researchers used a drug that interferes with the formation of neuronal connections (responsible for memory) in the brains of experimental mice by blocking a certain protein. The gist was this:
The experimental mouse was played a certain sound signal, and then electrocuted. The mouse eventually learned that the sound caused an electric shock, and then froze in danger every time it heard it (this is a typical mouse reaction to danger). After administering the drug to a new mouse, the mouse could not remember that the sound was followed by an electric shock, and despite repeated sounds and electric shocks, it did not respond properly to the sound as a danger.
Then the researchers came up with the idea to administer the drug not before training “beep-electric shock”, but while the mouse remembers what this sound means. The results were amazing!
The mouse forgot about the negative experience, as if it had never been electrocuted – hearing a well-known sound, it continued to behave as if nothing special was happening. To test that they had erased only a certain memory, they taught the mouse to be afraid of two different sounds, and then repeated the experiment for one of them, and saw that the mouse remembered one dangerous sound, but again forgot about the other. So the researchers came to the conclusion that memory is formed anew each time when remembering.
The researchers claim that the experiment with people also took place in order to relieve the symptoms of a psychological disorder – they say that they achieved significant relief in this way due to the loss of negative memories.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/91569-memory-and-forgetting/ (English)
Another experiment that allows you to delete and even embed pseudo-memories is well described by the guys at the presentation TED.com
In it, they used a laser beam to target specific areas of the brain.
https://www.ted.com/talks/steve_ramirez_and_xu_liu_a_mouse_a_laser_beam_a_manipulated_memory (there are Russian subtitles)
In addition, there is a small but very good review article about working with memory, prepared by the old team of the Tape.roo. Link to it below.
https://lenta.ru/articles/2013/08/03/pseudomem/