Ethical Analysis Of Memory

Memory is something that has always interested me. There is a TV show I watched where they showed a picture, followed by another with something missing, and the point was to try and notice what changed. There were also a couple movies I watched where people had their memories erased, but when I would try to think about how our memory works, I always felt as if I was in the dark about it. It is all a bunch of neurologically connected pieces of protein, in less than a cube foot of space. The movies I watched were science fiction, but erasing memory is actually possible now. When I started to ponder on all this it left me wondering if erasing memories is indeed ethical.

Even if our memory is just a bunch of neurological connections of proteins, …show more content…
There would be a hole from the memory being erased, such as in the movie Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind when Clementine said, “Nothing makes any sense to me! NOTHING MAKES ANY SENSE!” This was tested when a scientist played a tone for a rat before it was shocked. On an episode from the scientific podcast Radiolab titled "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Rat" Jad Abumrad said, “The moment it hears the tone and feels the shock, inside its head, a bunch of neurons start to build. Whenever you create a memory, it 's an active cellular connection. What we 're talking about here is associative memories, an association between two things in the outside world.” Basically, a connection was built between the tone brain cell and the shock brain cell. After playing the tone a second time, the rat would brace itself for the shock. Succeeding trying it out on a rat, they actually tried it on a human who had an unpleasant memory. Jad Abumrad continued, “She improved dramatically, to the point where she was telling it on TV.” Just think about when conditions end up downhill. It makes it real easy to think of all sorts of atrocious conditions, emotional pain. Correspondingly, when something happens, the best emotions are what we think about. We start imaging what could happen, depending on which emotion we feel respectively. We have all experienced an “OH YEAH, I ALMOST FORGOT!” moment. If you have not, you do not have a memory. Well, if emotion is erased with a memory, a person would be further inclined to start forgetting everything related to that emotion. After they gave the rat a drug, the rat was not scared when it heard the tone after getting