h+ Magazine

Spring 2009

Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/356

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Building Your Perfect Memory Suite in Four Easy Steps L ife is too short to spend it bogged down with painful memories. Trauma may build character, but pleasure primes the pathways of success, and modern humans spend too much time wallowing in trauma and minimizing pleasure. While hard-bitten life stories make for good literary memoirs and oscar-bait fi lms, they are hardly the material we want for our own lives. If advanced society means advanced access to information and opportunity, it should also mean advanced access to the memories of our choice; memories of happiness, pleasure, and success. From last-century's psychotherapy to this century's cognitive science, memory is no longer a mystery of the human condition, it is an upgradeable feature. Let's say you are the kind of despicable person — like a hit man or a politician or a contractor for blackwater — who does nasty things that would cause any human emotional scars. how could you live with yourself without becoming a sociopath? Just because your job description makes you do horrible things doesn't mean you have to live your entire life with the aftershocks of guilt. You can easily use a variety of chemical and therapeutic means to soften the memories of your horrible past and recreate yourself as a normal, happy well-adjusted person. This kind of memory softening is called "reconsolidation," and it works by taking advantage of a property of the brain that automatically recodes a memory after it has been consciously recalled. Research has shown that if a traumatic memory is consciously recalled under the infl uence of a beta-blocking chemical (like Propranolol), that same memory will be reconsolidated with far less emotional impact than the original memory. In contrast, if a memory is encoded with high levels of adrenaline and cortisol (the very substances that beta- blockers inhibit), that memory will necessarily become traumatic. by all known psychiatric measurements, traumatic memories stunt the ability to grow emotionally and learn new things; they weigh down the psyche with emotional baggage. If you could chemically dump your baggage in the context of a friendly therapeutic setting, James Kent AI 58 Feb 2009 bIo enhAnCeD nAno hUMoR FoReVeR YoUng neURo

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