Drug To "Delete" Bad Memories

Oh my. This can bad ... real bad. Not to mention all of the hypothetical scenarios we can conjure up for a drug like this. After all, every cause has an effect.

So if you want to forget about you girl breaking your heart by sleeping with you best friend ... this drug is for you.

Live Science:

Researchers at Harvard and McGill University (in Montreal) are working on an amnesia drug that blocks or deletes bad memories. The technique seems to allow psychiatrists to disrupt the biochemical pathways that allow a memory to be recalled.

In a new study, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, the drug propranolol is used along with therapy to "dampen" memories of trauma victims. They treated 19 accident or rape victims for ten days, during which the patients were asked to describe their memories of the traumatic event that had happened 10 years earlier. Some patients were given the drug, which is also used to treat amnesia, while others were given a placebo.

A week later, they found that patients given the drug showed fewer signs of stress when recalling their trauma.

In New York further studies were done on rats in which they were able to remove bad memories while preserving positive ones. Do rats have bad memories, and how do we know that? Well, at least the tests dealt with shock treatment.

I've seen movies with this sort of thing in it. Will we be able to remove the memories of murderers, and then set them free? Also, what about the notion that your life experience is essential to the type of person you will become? If we erase all bad memories, what type of human beings will we have roaming the earth?