A few weeks back, probably when I was searching the Internet for something I had forgotten, I stumbled across a “Ted Talk” by two neuroscientists, Xu Liu and Steve Ramirez.
If you don’t know what a Ted Talk is, you should check it out. TED originally stood for Technology, Entertainment and Design, but today the acronym is most closely associated with these often-intriguing video-recorded talks of 18 minutes or less by experts with a particular perspective.
In this case, Liu and Ramirez tells an audience in Boston about their research examining whether it’s possible to edit the content of our memories. In short, the answer appears to be “yes.”
These two men used lasers with mice to manipulate memory recall. Obviously, in less than 18 minutes, nobody’s going to earn a doctorate in neuroscience, but the pair do a fairly succinct job of detailing how they get a mouse to react to a memory from one environment while it was in an entirely different environment.
It’s fascinating work, but it wasn’t really the point of their talk. Instead, the used their work as a springboard to suggest discussions of such work don’t need to happen just in the world of science, but in the real world where science might one day be applied. Ethical and moral questions abound.
It made me wonder why someone would ever want one of his or her memories manipulated.
The science fiction world has offered up such scenarios for years, and in film it’s been used in everything from “Total Recall” to “Brainstorm” and probably well beyond. Come to think of it, I’ve seen a lot of movies I wouldn’t mind having removed from my memories because they were so bad.
Heck, I even remember Mr. Spock implanting memories in the original “Star Trek” series.
In reality, though, isn’t the idea kind of scary?
I tend to think who I am today is made up of all the memories and experiences I’ve collected in my noggin all my life. Start messing with those and you start messing with who I am.
I’ve been blessed with a life in which no memory is so bad I’d prefer to have it erase. I’m also aware there are people with such horrendous memories they might view erasure as a preferable alternative.
Who ever said life is even supposed to be made up of just the good stuff?
I ran across across an article the other day from The Atlantic advising people to buy experiences, not things. Experiences, they suggested, bring people more happiness than possessions. The studies cited run counter to the idea I’ve heard before, that an experience will be over and gone while a possession, such as an iPhone or new furniture, lasts for a long time.
“It’s the fleetingness of experiential purchases that endears us to them,” the author, James Hamblin, wrote. “Either they’re not around long enough to become imperfect, or they are imperfect, but our memories and stories of them get sweet with time. Even a bad experience becomes a good story.”
Bad experiences perhaps become permanently negative through the idea that life would have otherwise turned out great, except for those experiences. The sooner we realize life is made up of both the good and the bad, that all those experiences make us who we are, the sooner we can stop being angry about the fact something bad happened.
I certainly don’t think any of us will necessarily reach the point in which we will be glad about the experience in the midst of a tragedy or other bad experience. The character it builds won’t be revealed as a positive for quite some time.
The book of Romans in the Bible tells Christians “we know that in all things God works together for the good of those who love him.”
Another example is a story from Buddhist traditions: “Say you have a coin with heads on one side and tails on the other side. One side would mean good and the other bad. However, you can’t decide the outcome and the coin flips many times throughout your life. Finding balance is flipping the coin in such a way that neither of the sides is of greater importance to you, but if the coin lands on the middle bit, you realize that the space between what you consider good or bad is so small and the probability of landing there is also incredibly small without continuous practice. However, no matter the outcome, you choose to accept the coin as it is, with both sides, and appreciate the importance of both in your life. For the coin of life has meaning and value no matter what side it lands on. It’s each individual’s choice whether to bet on the outcome or not, but ultimately your coin of life will be spent somehow.”
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Greg Harton is editorial page editor for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Contact him by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @NWAGreg.