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Helping the Brain Forget. Perspectives on therapeutic forgetting| old_uid | 1835 |
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| title | Helping the Brain Forget. Perspectives on therapeutic forgetting |
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| start_date | 2006/11/28 |
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| schedule | 17h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Human beings strive to use their advancing knowledge about brain architecture to achieve increasing control over their brain’s design and functions. One of the most desired goals of human brain design is to gain mastery of our own memories: enhancing our capacity to remember as well as our ability to forget. The human brain needs to maintain equilibrium between memory and oblivion and naturally rejects irrelevant or disruptive memories. However, extensive amounts of stress hormones released at the time of a traumatic event can give rise to such powerful memory formation that traumatic memories cannot be rejected and do not vanish or diminish with time: post-traumatic stress disorder may then develop. Recent pilot studies in the field suggest that it is possible to help the brain forget disturbing memories and induce so-called “therapeutic forgetting”. Beta-blockers stopping the action of these stress hormones are suggested to reduce the emotional impact of disturbing memories or prevent their consolidation. Such intervention could in principle help people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, but the idea of doing so is both scientifically and ethically controversial. The aim to gain control over memory functions in order to help people suffering from disorders is laudable, and from an ethical point of view there is no intrinsic problem with the development of methods to induce therapeutic forgetting. If controlled use of propranolol can cure people from, or help prevent PTSD that is laudatory. In contrast, it may encounter extrinsic problems if the techniques are misused or inadequately justified scientifically. Whether the benefits are sufficient to counterbalance the possible risks of (civilian or military) misuse is an essentially socio-political question that natural and social scientists, philosophers and policy-makers must answer by joint efforts. |
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| responsibles | Fagot-Largeault, Changeux |
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