Tag PTSD

Would You?

“Spray To Forget” is an art project-cum-product from designer/artist Reed Seifer; he’s blended some aromatic oils that are used for stress relief aromatherapy, with the idea that you can “edit your consciousness” to overwrite bad or unwanted memories.

While Seifer’s project is a bit wishful, there are real efforts to understand how to manipulate or mitigate memories using pharmaceuticals like the beta-blocker propranolol (which is normally prescribed as a blood pressure medication). As this Wired interview with Anders Sandberg points out, the ethical complications are enormous, and we as a society are probably not ready to engage in them constructively enough, but that doesn’t mean there won’t continue to be efforts to bring memory-altering drugs to the marketplace.

My open question for your consideration is whether you’d consider using something like “Spray To Forget” as a way to deal with traumatic experiences that are difficult to process. To my own surprise, I am a little uncertain; once upon a time I would have vehemently said “no”, but now I sometimes find myself wishing I could simply wipe away painful memories that even the passage of time hasn’t fully managed.

EmailStumbleUponRedditDiggFacebookTwitterShare

Related Posts:

More Proof That Tetris Is Better Than Crack

I’ve seen this story linked all over the place today, so it must be true: researchers at Oxford University claim that playing Tetris can be an effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder because it helps prevent the formation of bad memories.

Speaking from personal experience, it has been my belief for a long time that there is indeed something about Tetris that is a bit psychoactive. It’s easy to slip into almost a trance-like state when playing Tetris if one’s surroundings foster concentration and eliminate other distractions. The so-called “Tetris Effect” is a known and studied phenomenon; a 2000 study found that 60 percent of subjects who played Tetris had dreams about playing the game. I know I had Tetris dreams for a very long time about 20 years ago, when I used to play it for hours every evening. Those researchers were looking at what is called “hypnagogic sleep” — learning a task while asleep through the mechanism of dreams. Something about the game triggers a response in the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain responsible for generating and “fixing” memory. This new study shows that playing Tetris in the near aftermath of a traumatic event acts to prevent the formation of memories by redirecting the hippocampus to focus on the spatial relationships of the game.

Y’know, there was already a Star Trek episode about this, where a sneaky alien babe tries to take over the Enterprise by getting everyone addicted to a video game…and Tetris WAS written by a Russian software developer at the height of the Reagan Era…maybe this is some leftover Soviet mind control that imperils Democracy And Freedom™! Quick, somebody alert President Obama and…..what? He’s playing what on his Blackberry? Oh, never mind.

EmailStumbleUponRedditDiggFacebookTwitterShare

Related Posts:

All Original Content Copyright © BrianKaneOnline
All Other Content Copyright © Its Original Authors

Built on Notes Blog Core
Powered by WordPress

Switch to our mobile site