Thought control made easy: Drug causes "limited amnesia"

[TechBear_Seattle]

Wipe out a single memory

A single, specific memory has been wiped from the brains of rats, leaving other recollections intact.

The study adds to our understanding of how memories are made and altered in the brain, and could help to relieve sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of the fearful memories that disrupt their lives. The results are published in Nature Neuroscience.

The brain secures memories by transferring them from short-term to long-term storage, through a process called reconsolidation. It has been shown before that this process can be interrupted with drugs. But Joseph LeDoux of the Center for Neural Science at New York University and his colleagues wanted to know how specific this interference was: could the transfer of one specific memory be meddled with without affecting others?

The article continues at http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070305/full/070305-17.html

[formercia]

1. The down side

make someone forget they committed a crime. The politician's best friend.


"Senator, I have no recollection."

[no_hypocrisy]

2. What's next? Pharmaceutical lobotomy? n/t

[formercia]

7. Operation Paperclip

and the byproducts of Nazi scientists brought to America after WWII.

I had drugs administered to me to "fry my brains" in order to make me forget operations I was involved with.

http://www.freedommag.org/english/vol38i/page22.htm

THE LITTLEST 'GUINEA PIGS'
In a 1993 interview in the Quebec magazine, L'Actualite', Montreal psychiatrist Heinz Lehmann was asked about the Duplessis Orphans. Significantly, he said that back in the 1950s, psychiatrists could distinguish between those who were truly mentally ill and normal children like the Orphans.1

A Quebec government document2 obtained by Freedom reveals that Orphans were housed at Verdun Protestant (now Douglas) Hospital, the psychiatric facility where Lehmann worked for decades, making it virtually impossible that Lehmann did not know about the Orphans incarcerated there, and unlikely that he was not involved in their "treatment" as psychiatric patients.

Freedom also obtained declassified intelligence agency documents that reveal the drug Lehmann championed, chlorpromazine, was one of the substances tested under a top secret project in 1954.

Chlorpromazine brought a bonanza to Lehmann. After working in virtual obscurity, he found the doors wide open to hundreds of thousands of dollars in research grants. While three people died under ghastly circumstances in just one of his published drug tests, involving eight individuals, Lehmann fattened off pharmaceutical funds and the intelligence sources that also supported the infamous "mind-control" psychiatrist Ewen Cameron. Lehmann's fellow psychiatrists bestowed upon him virtually every major North American psychiatric award.

--snip--

[no_hypocrisy]

8. Jesus!!! I thought stuff like this was only in late-night movies about

Nazis.

[PhilipShore]

11. Hillary: The Manchurian Candidate

[NJCher]

3. I'm sure the U.S. gov't will jump right on this

They could take the PTSD soldiers, give them a brain operation, and ship 'em right back to kill some more Iraqis. A match made in heaven--this researching finding and our miltaristic government.

Oh wait. They're doing that now without the inconvenience of an operation.

Never mind.



Cher

[The2ndWheel]

4. We just keep screwing with everything

Can't stop it though. If we can do it, we'll do it. However, it won't stop with a single memory. No, the relentlessly progressive quest for perfection won't allow that. It will then have to be two memories, then all of them. That is, if we can do it. If we can do it, we will do it. No other factor matters. The only question is if we can.

[riverwalker]

5. Powell in 2003:"Everyone here (D.C.) uses Ambien"

QUESTION: So do you use sleeping tablets to organize yourself?

SECRETARY POWELL: Yes. Well, I wouldn't call them that. They're a wonderful medication -- not medication. How would you call it? They're called ambien, which is very good. You don't use ambien? Everybody here uses ambien.

QUESTION: I use it when I go on trip and long distance travel.

SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah. I didn't need it this time because I was in the same time zone.

QUESTION: I see.

SECRETARY POWELL: It's when I go to your part of the world. I need to get my rest.

http://www.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2003/26028.htm

[Richard Steele]

6. How long until we discover this stuff occurs naturally in the brains of B*sh-supporters?

Ya gotta admit- that would explain a LOT.

[NashVegas]

9. When Scientists Become Ration-Driven, Useful Idiots

People with PTSD need help coping with their feelings and memories, not *erasing* them.

[The2ndWheel]

10. Far more efficient to erase them

Then they can get back to being productive at whatever it is that they do. It's all about production and efficiency. The easier we make the transition to an efficient, predictable, rational, productive machine, the better it will be for everyone. That way we won't have to worry about life and all the unhappy moments. Everything is then standardized, thoughtless, and build for a world run of, for, and by the clock. Feelings and memories are obsolete.