How would the ability to erase bad memories affect how people interact?

Apparently there is a new drug in the works that can minimize the trauma and memory associated with a bad event. Do you think that if this is used in a widespread manner, people will become more nonchalant about terrible things? Afterall, if you can take a pill and the bad memories disappear will the world somehow become an easier place to live?How would the ability to erase bad memories affect how people interact?
You ask me, they shouldn't use mind altering drugs, period. Who knows what might else people would ';lose'; besides their ';bad'; memories.How would the ability to erase bad memories affect how people interact?
maybe everyone would be happy. annnnd maybeeeee we could finally have world peace. hah never gonna happen though..
I think that if we are able to forget the bad things, there won't be much else left to talk about. Also, bad things suck but they make life the fascinating experience that it is!
Well, the way we are today is in great part a result of our past experiences. This may be useful for people who were traumatizes as children or for soldiers suffereing from post traumatic stress syndrome. I don't think it should be used on people who are normal.
I think people would loose there fear when getting into relationships and I also think that it would help people do things that they thought they couldn't maybe *crazy* thought they drowned in their past life and now they don't swim you know things like that. I think it would be beneficial only once though.
I disagree. If all the bad memories disappeared, how are we to learn from what went wrong? How are we to set things right again if they never felt wrong in the first place? If that goes through, people are going to have a lot of moral decisions to make.



I have nothing against people who have been abused or neglected and who are afraid of relationships, but I think that if people were to start using this drug, we'd all become a little more numb.
It's impossible not to make mistakes, erasing the memory of them would be horrible. Think about it, if there is no memory of a mistake you made, then you'll just make it again. The same goes for bad memories (which is...?), even bad memories have life lessons in them that contribute to our everyday life.
i think that would be good to use for someone who is a rape victim or something of that nature.
I think society has already become numb to a lot of the bad things that go on in the world and it only gets worse with every generation. If we add this drug to the mix we may become completely numb sooner rather than later.
ahh!! i just read the yahoo homepage and saw that. i think it is a horrible idea. You would think that instead of trying to make your memory go away that Harvard and all the other geniuses would try to make people with alltimers (excuse my spelling) memory come back. But i guess that isn't important. It's much better have people who have bad memories forget it instead of living with their mistake.



yeah....right. it's a bad idea and a complete waist of time.
We would all be smiling idiots when no real sense of reality, except for those who aren't taking the medicines, that are controlling us.

Didn't LSD come from government experiments?
I'd need to know what the side-effects are before I hailed it as a great discovery. If it works on memory, what other data in the memory part of the brain would be affected? Memory being lost by people suffering from illnesses like dementia is accompanied by other effects. I wouldn't like to guess how people would react to such a drug, - maybe the loss of the memory would lead them to commit an error which would enable the same event to be replayed, to their detriment, - such as being mugged because of showing off a new Ipod!
The disgraceful fad of using suppressed memories during the early 90s to drum up fictitious crimes had destroyed thousands of lives and nobody was punished for it.

This sickening research is nothing but another attempt to bring this criminal practice back under the guise of ';science'; and should be stopped now.
taking pills has already shown to be a bad thing..



We're dependant on pills and antibiotics and the germs, bugs are all adapting turning into super bugs...



Sure for a time being these pills might solve our problems.. Short term. But then the bleeding hearts will give it to criminals and victims. Oh, bad driving, here take this pill, that will solve your episode, crash again..



';you learn from your mistakes,'; what mistake, I'll pop a pill...



Short term gain, long term pain, and on a global scale really bad, ';slavery/holocaust, what slavery/holocaust. Didn't you all take your pills...??';
Its ridiculous. In my opinion at least. It is going to have a huge impact on the evolutionary process is what it's going to do. There is a reason people suffer from PTSD. Let me break it down for you real quick. -Life threatening event-release of adrenaline and noradrenaline(fight or flight response)-release of these chemicals solidifies the memory-flashback causes yet another release of these chemicals reinforcing the memory-chain reaction thing happens causing the nightmares and flashbacks of PTSD... Alright, now look at it this way... Why do we have that response? It not only serves the immediate purpose of helping us survive during the event, it also ensures that because enough people have this response to this similar set of stimuli (be it war, rape, murder) generation after generation (although in most cases not as severe) 10s of thousands of years down the evolutionary trail we'll have yet another tool added to our innate biological functions to make us aware of these situations before they arise. Taking that response away (I have been diagnosed with PTSD by the way) would be so extremely counterproductive.



Another note, it is going to be abused. There are no doubt going to be the people who say 'hey, I can do this, cause if I regret it I can just get some of those pills and be okay with it'...



They're also looking into using similar chemicals for the treatment of Alzheimers. Although I have seen what the disease can do to someone, I'll be honest, I would rather die not being aware of what's going on, than die of cancer, or liver disease, or heart disease.



By the way, I already see a couple thumbs down for using the word evolution... but you asked for an opinion.
big mistake

big mistake eraser

%26lt;%26gt;%26lt;%26lt;%26gt;%26lt;GOD%26lt;%26gt;%26lt;%26lt;%26gt;%26lt;

is the answer