Research for a book....is there something that erases a persons memory.?

Question

Is there somethign that erases a persons memory ...like if they went through a bad experience they could cope and not remember? I am writing a book and needed some help with this particular research.

Answer 1

Several things can make us forget things which have happened to us. Lack of oxygen, lobotomy, brain disease, time,age and bad experiences can help us forget or have erased memories.
Each is a subject in itself on how they affect the brain and the memory, might try and separate the causes on where memory is affected

Answer 2

Hi Cookie

Partout's answer is kinda correct, but things aren't quite that simple.

Messages travel through the brain as both electrical signals (inside each neuron) and as chemical signals (at each synapses - the link between one neuron and the next).

Electric shock treatment blasts the electrical pulses within neurons, but doesn't necessarily blast all the synapses. So people who suffer ECT (electro-convulsive therapy - the polite name for electric shock treatment) make not be too clear about what happened just before the treatment began. but they certainly don't lose ALL their memories. (Though repeated treatment does tend to induce some degree of cabbageitis after a while).

So if you want to erase someone's memory you'll need some pretty severe electric shocks, and you'll almost certainly end up with a helpless vegetable, not just a fully functioning person who has no memory.
(Using drugs to blow all the chemical synapses would be equally drastic.)

By the way, trauma doesn't necessarily erase memories. The brain just kinda tucks them away somehow. Something like Freud's idea about a process he called "repression" which supposedly keeps painful memories buried in the subconscious.
(It's pretty difficult to find out exactly what happened to a memory once it's lost. Has it gone completely, or just gone into hiding?).

Answer 3

If a person experiences an event that the psyche considers traumatizing enough, it can erase or block the memory of that event.

Answer 4

Hypnosis can probably erase certain memories or experiences, but the mind doesn't erase such things - it may repress the event for some time - but it will come out sooner or later...

Answer 5

Partial frontal lobotomy does that and so does electroshock therapy. Both of these techniques are still in use in the United states and so it shouldn't be to hard for you to find out about them.

Answer 6

This is something that might interest you.... i heard about it a couple months ago........ a pill that erases bad memories
http://preceptlady.tblog.com/post/1969864399
http://ethics.tamucc.edu/comments.pl?sid=384&op=&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=nested&pid=0
http://newsfromrussia.com/science/2006/01/14/71181.html

Best of luck
Hope this helps