[extropy-chat] memory enhancer drug on the way

[Anders Sandberg]

tisdagen den 9 mars 2004 01.08 wrote Daniel Matthews:
> > A drug ... that enables people to improve their memory is to be tested on
> > humans and could be on sale within five years.
>
> As Steven Rose points out, this type of drug could be very dangerous.
> Being able to forget is as an important part of learning, as being able to
> remember is.
>
> You could forcibly program a person with such a drug, or traumatise them so
> intensely that it was very hard for them to recover.

I think you are a bit too alarmist here. My impression of the literature is 
that the best results still are a 10-20% improvement of memory on various 
tests.

There is likely downsides, but they will likely not be "loss of forgetting". 
There is a lot of competition going on for the values of synapses, and a 
CREB-inhibitor like this is only going to make it easier to lay down new 
information (sometimes overwriting old). My guess is that the problem will be 
that more "junk" will be consolidated into memory, producing a somewhat 
messier thoughtspace - the difference between highly relevant facts and less 
relevant vanishes. But this is when the drug is taken chronically. 

Programming people seems rather unlikely. I don't know if the drug would act 
on the strong synapses in the amygdala, but if it did it would likely make 
them more changeable - and hence make a wonderful *deprogramming* tool by 
enabling unlearning of strongly learned stimulus-emotion responses. I know of 
some experiments using another memory enhancer drug to help phobia therapy, 
where the drug is combined with virtual reality therapy to extinguish the 
phobia and prevent recurrence. It has shortened the therapy time by half, 
which is rather good. 

Drugs that control the amygdala could potentially do very nasty things. Just 
giving somebody panic attacks is nasty enough, but I think it is eminently 
possible to activate the aversion system to create intense fear/angst linked 
to conditioned objects. A Clockwork Orange got things quite right. However, 
that requires *different* drugs than the cortical memory enhancers we are 
talking about here. 


-- 
Anders Sandberg
http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa
http://www.aleph.se/andart/

The sum of human knowledge sounds nice. But I want more.