Memory erase

If erasing certain memories ever became a possibility, would you consider trying it?

It already is possible, and I already have done it in a less permanent. In my case I just iteratively stripped associated links to memories and built passive systems to suppress recollection. I left the memories intact and eventually came to reclaim them.

You can bury memories in such a way that you'll never find them again, and you can deliberately fragment and dissolve them to the point where you're incapable of reconstructing any form of it.

My advice, don't bother going down that road. It's better to build a new self and reality by building than selectively removing and thinking you'll be able to better build on what's left. It will only lead to misery. A great irony.

This is interesting as fuck. Please tell more.

What do you want to know specifically?
I just built a crude shell personality and "funneled" myself into it. The brain is already very good at enforcing behavioral consistency (whether it's dependent on context, a given social group, a role), so in part I exploited that.

Every time a memory was brought to mind that I didn't like or find useful, usually autobiographical, I would break it down into its core pieces and identify what spurred the memory, then actively remove all of those links. Or distort them, or render them inoperable, whatever the case might be. It's hard to put it into language, but it's eventually a pretty simple and fluid process. Eventually they just stopped occurring. Associated psychological and emotional aspects of these memories, also at least in a higher sense, were no thus longer present either. Though it's possible artifacts were still ticking away subconsciously.

Etc. There's a lot to be said, and a bit of overlap with the process of deliberately creating and solidifying false memories. I was disgusted and hated myself, and also wanted to avoid stress for various reasons, so I was just using old systems and tools I'd already developed and performing this process naturally. It wasn't planned. Had it been planned and executed as such, I think it's possible a person might never wake up and question how they knew all the things they did, why they can't remember their childhood, why they do anything they do, etc. How would you prevent this? Creation of false memories and a false experienced everyday context.

>Implying I don't every Friday

At least, I think I do. All the signs point to it happening (empty bottle of grain alcohol, piss soaked pants, liver pain, vomit in toaster)

>Drinking to "forget"
Not a thing. Address your real problems.

I'd be afraid that the company would just erase the memory of me coming to them to get erased and I'd repeat going to them until my bank account is dry.

> address your problems
I can't. They got a restraining order.

>Address your real problems.
I've run out of grain alcohol and aint sober enough to make it to the liquor store? Never happens, I always have a spare case hidden behind the TV.

Drunk but not drunk enough.

Easily solved with more grain alcohol.

If you had any.

Did you learn this from books etc? Which?

No, I discovered it over time or via some ancillary aspect of other things I was working on. Mostly stemming from trying to figure out what drove perception, personality states (and varying capacity dependent on state), and better ways to encode and store memories. I wanted arbitrary and instantaneous storage of information, and ended up settling on a tree-like structure that existed in broader webs, for the most part.

My personality was also splintering at the time and I often felt I had been robbed of progress and become "stuck" as the wrong person, thus not having access to what I knew I was capable of and needed at the time. And I couldn't shift out of it. This caused me great discomfort.

Anyway. Part of what I found was driven by a sensation of necessity, some of it I was just naturally tracing out what the could be made to be, and thus do. Those two things are more of dualism actually, two sides of the same overall complex. It's all about metacognition, and developing systems to more directly and efficiently bridge things (sometimes finding things in the "middle"). It's necessarily abstract and can;t readily be communicated in more mechanical or procedural terms.

>what the could be made to be, and thus do
what the mind*

You seem good at writing and I'm sure you could elaborate in a small book or pamphlet. I'd certainly want to buy it, not just for the memory erasing, but the other things you mention. I can tell myself to be calm in stressful situations, and the way I think was altered by learning programming languages, but a systematic approach to modifying my thought processes has eluded me.

>brain circuity stays the same except in the targeted area

seems legit and safe and will most definitely work and have no negatives, what so ever.

> If erasing certain memories ever became a possibility, would you consider trying it?

Only if I understood EXACTLY how it worked.

And then, probably not.

It does but it fucks your memory up in the long term.There was this research with people who had ptsd and removing the memories made them have bad memory and what not.
Just listen to he knows what he is talking about , don't do it.

Bump for potential.

memories are too diffuse to be "erased"

From what I've understood about memories, I don't think it's possible to "erase" any specific memory, because there aren't any "specific" memories.

It seems to be that memories are procedurally generated from amongst the various connections and served to the visual-spatial workspace to re-experience them.

This fits the false memories experiment results, and strongly analogous of old SC1 replays (they didn't always replay the same twice)

So memories aren't like movie files, but a cascade of pointers starting from a collection of source neurons that procedurally work backwards to build the experienced memory based on the firing patterns as they exist.

So if you learn something new, or find yourself a better understanding of certain phenomenon, and then remember an old experience that involves that concept, you might re-remember an experience in "more detail", but you couldn't have experienced it like that at the time, as you didn't know that new piece of information.

It only makes sense now because the cascading pointer blob spikes into the newly improved conceptual space and continues to unfold in the same pattern, even though there are new nodes in the chain.

Maybe instead of erasing, you could manipulate similar memories to be much more likely to be recalled instead by duplicating as near to the experience as you can, while deviating at certain points to cause the pieces of the memory you don't want, to be a lower priority during recall.