image © Rex Features
It’s Saturday morning. You wake up, remember your antics from the night before and then promptly wish for permanent memory loss.
As you start to stir from your slumber after a particularly heavy night on the town, your tongue feels like sandpaper and your breath is flammable. As you coax open your eyes one at a time, everything seems well in the world for a split second. Then you start remembering.
As memories slowly filter through your consciousness, each of them is more cringe-worthy than the last. Did you really throw up into your friend’s handbag and then insist on showing the cute guy standing next to you? Did you really start a two-man conga around the posh restaurant?
Anyone who’s enjoyed a few too many vodkas will be able to relate to the overwhelming wish that they had the ability to turn back time.
As those horrible mortifying memories come to the surface in the haze of the morning after, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to just pop them back in and forget about them as if they’d never happened? Or erase them for good with a magic stick like in the film, Men in Black?
Well you might be in luck. Scientist boffins have been tinkering with a substance in the brain that could make us forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, or even a bad habit.
Research by Dr Todd C Sacktor and Andre A Fenton has demonstrated a chemical’s effect on memory, which could potentially be used to treat trauma, addiction and other conditions.
"On the one hand, you can imagine a scenario in which a person enters a setting which elicits traumatic memories, but now has a drug that weakens those memories as they come up. Or, in the case of addiction, a drug that weakens the associations that stir cravings.”
So the use of ZIP could be hugely beneficial for individuals and society in helping food, drink or drug addicts.
And when it comes to relationships, just imagine how less painful a break up would be if you could simply erase the memories of all the good times you had together to stop them torturing you?
There could be some potential dangers though. A lot of memories are linked to each other, so what if erasing that idiot who broke up with you, also accidentally erased a great friend you made while you were with him? Or because it was him who taught you how to play pool, you forgot that too?
And what’s to stop you foregoing the pill yourself and slipping it into somebody else’s drink instead (I’m thinking this could come in handy for your boss after the Christmas party).
So far, the research has been done only on animals, but scientists say this memory system is likely to work almost identically in people, so watch this space for future eradication of cringe-worthy or just plain painful memories.
In the meantime, if you see a particularly carefree mouse, he’s probably just blissfully unaware of what he got up to the night before…
More Liz Frost features
Are you having a quarter-life crisis?
