Futurismic

Yet again, the line between science fiction and real life gets thinner, and another of our stories gains a slightly prophetic edge.  Richard Kadrey’s Twitter stream alerted me to an article at The Guardian about a therapeutic process whereby traumatic memories can be rewritten or edited in order to make them less debilitating… without the use of drugs. I’m no psychologist, but it reminds me a little bit of the aversion therapy approach:

… 20 volunteers sat in front of a computer screen on which squares of different colours appeared. When blue squares flashed on the screen, they received an electric shock to the wrist.

The next day, the volunteers were shown blue squares again to reactivate the memory. Sensors placed on their skin showed that the images caused the participants to sweat as their stress levels rose.

To erase the memory that linked blue squares with pain, the volunteers were put through “extinction training” which involved flashing blue squares on the screen without the accompanying electrical shocks.

When the volunteers were retested a day later, the fear associated with the squares had gone, but only in participants whose memories were rewritten soon after their fear was reactivated…

In other words, expose the subject to the traumatic memory trigger minus the trauma soon enough after the event, and you can prevent lasting problems. Perhaps this sort of process would be useful for lessening the impact of post-traumatic stress in military personnel on active service? Either which way, it’s reminiscent of Marissa Lingen’s “Erasing The Map”, published here back in February of this year… though Marissa’s story saw memories being deleted rather than edited

Well, looks like we can chalk up another predictive success for a Futurismic author! This time it’s the turn of Marissa Lingen, whose “Erasing the Map” seems eerily prescient of recent research at Oxford University into the selective editing of memories:

Wired.com: How selective will memory editing be?

Sandberg: Current research seems to suggest that it can be pretty specific, but there will be side effects. It may not even be that you forget other memories. Small, false memories could be created. And we’re probably not going to be able to predict that before we actually try them.

[...]

Wired.com: It seems that it would be easy to test “tip of the tongue” drug effects on the sorts of small things one recalls on an everyday basis. But what if it’s old, infrequently recalled but still-important memories that are threatened by side effects?

Sandberg: It’s pretty messy to determine what is an important memory to us. They quite often crop up, but without us consciously realizing that we’re thinking of the memory. That’s probably good news, as every time you recall a memory, you also tend to strengthen it.

Wired.com: How likely is the manipulation of these fundamental memories?

Sandberg: Big memories, with lots of connections to other things we’ve done, will probably be messy to deal with. But I don’t think those are the memories that people want to give up.  Most people would want to edit memories that impair them.

Of course, if we want to tweak memories to look better to ourselves, we might get a weird concept of self.

Indeed we might… but I’d say the odds are good that people will try to do exactly that. The street finds its own use for things, right? [image by ebbdog]

But what will happen if you try to edit a memory that is false – the repressed memory of abuse that may not have actually happened, for example? If memories are interlinked, what might you lose along with the bad stuff? And if memories can be expunged, could they also be inserted? We’re deep into Philip K Dick territory right here…

Well, you’re in luck! Apex Online is on the lookout for a masochist slush pile reader submissions editor, which would be a great place to start learning the trade if you’re a genre fan.

It’s also a great post for aspiring writers, because you’ll get to see the mistakes that others make and (hopefully) learn from them… click click click!

Reports suggest that an over-enthusiastic wielding of the banhammer by a high-ranking Wikipedia admin has blown the lid off of a secret internal mailing list used to maintain the control of a central cabal of editors.

I don’t find the existence of website power-cliques particularly surprising; I can’t think of one forum or blog I’ve posted on where an ecosystem of rank and authority hasn’t emerged from the community. In most cases, nor do I find it particularly worrying.

Wikipedia is a special case, however – simply by dint of its claims to impartiality and universal editorial access – and it will be interesting to see what comes of this story. I’m also taking it with a pinch of salt – while it’s doubtless based on fact, there are a lot of folk with axes to grind against Wikipedia for various reasons, and most reports about it are at least as biased as the average Wiki article. And therein lies the crux of the issue, which The Register’s article sums up nicely:

“If you take Wikipedia as seriously as it takes itself, this is a huge problem.”

I use Wikipedia quite a bit, but never as a primary source, and never to research issues or persons of a controversial nature. What about you – is Wikipedia a valuable resource or a waste of bandwidth? [Image by Leonard Low]