Have You Tried Turning Your Brain Off and On Again?
I’ve been following Susumu Tonegawa and his team’s research for years on how to erase bad memories. They’ve already managed to do it in mice, but it can’t be that complicated because I don’t think mice have that many memories. Then again, if they do, they must all be awful. Think about it: you wake up in the morning in a garbage can, a cat tries to eat you, you starve, you end up eating a piece of cheese lying in the street, a seagull pecks you in the butt, you try to take refuge in a bar, and people climb on the tables, shout at you, and finally hit you with a broom. And so on every day. Tonegawa has a lot of work ahead of him.
In any case, the words of one of the authors of the Japanese scientist’s study at the University of Massachusetts are chilling: “Now we can access the inside of the brain and manipulate it to change behavior associated with a memory without using medication.” And he presents it as an achievement, when in reality it’s a terrifying discovery. If this scientist had said “testicles” instead of “brain,” millions of men would be locked in their homes, armed to the teeth. Yet no one seems to have been particularly shaken by the news, as if the brain were some minor, everyday matter.
We Millennials, who are incapable of remembering anything on our own without the help of some electronic device, were only missing someone to start erasing things from our minds. We’re the generation that never remembers to buy bread, the one that has spent the most money on Post-it notes, the one that has 300 daily alarms set on Alexa, and the only one that mysteriously forgets other people’s birthdays when there’s no WiFi. We’re more like the Generation of Forgetting. (RELATED: Why Aren’t We Talking About Things That Matter Anymore?)
The only things I currently keep in my brain are thousands of passwords and hundreds of names of my favorite pets, so I can recover them. So if these guys in Massachusetts misfire their laser and accidentally fry anything that isn’t a bad memory, chances are I won’t be able to access my email, withdraw money, or make a phone call tomorrow. They say this will open a new door for treating depression, but the only thing that’s certain is that it will greatly facilitate fueling repression.
Forgetting has its own clock, and it’s infallible, and it only heals what needs to be healed.
And if I still have any of my bad memories left, I would never want to erase them artificially. Bad memories and good memories — that’s life. Forgetting has its own clock, and it’s infallible, and it only heals what needs to be healed. It’s very much of our time to want to erase everything that feels hostile to us all at once, but sometimes those are the only things that force us to think. In every person’s story, as in History itself, remembering the bad is essential. Only then can we understand events, decisions, and great tragedies. Whenever humanity has tried to invent a perfect history, it has ended up losing its mind, without the help of any Japanese Nobel laureate. From oblivion, only oblivion can come. Scorched earth.
Postmodernity increasingly holds this irrational allure, as if it were in a tremendous hurry to get nowhere. If older generations didn’t know where they were supposed to go, and if the ones that preceded us were too certain of the utopia they wanted to reach, it has fallen to us to run just for the sake of running, chasing after nothing in particular, furiously scrolling through TikTok videos along the way so as not to fall prey to the most terrifying enemy stalking the inhabitants of the 21st century: boredom. (RELATED: Don’t Sue the Mirror)
Perhaps that explains why romantic poets and political singer-songwriters are starving to death right now. Kids are too glued to their screens to notice a beautiful woman, or to form an original political thought beyond three or four slogans that work just as well for Twitter as they do for Tinder. Undoubtedly, the song that best reflects the great ideal of the Millennial Generation is silence, perhaps seasoned with the very soft flickering of a router.
The authors of the study suggest that they will eliminate our bad thoughts and put us in a good mood without using “any chemical substances.” This means they are already thinking about banning wine. I know their type, and that’s how they are. Let’s be frank. Science still hasn’t solved the issue of chocolate stains on white clothes. They should finish one job before starting the next. As long as they don’t know how to remove chocolate stains without ruining the clothes, I highly doubt they can erase bad memories without ruining our brains.
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