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Tuesday, 03 April 2007 |
by LINDSAY TIGAR
Lifestyles Reporter
It’s 2 a.m., and a young woman has just crashed her car. She’s on a back road with limited lighting.
Without a cell phone, she finds herself lost, alone and afraid.
Leanna M. Kiess, a senior special education major, found herself in this situation her freshman year at Appalachian State University.
If Kiess wanted to forget the entire experience because of its traumatic effects, in a few years, she possibly could.
A new pill is being studied by Roger Pittman, a Harvard Medical School
psychiatrist, that will ultimately erase a traumatic event from a
person’s memory.
According to an article on ABCnews.go.com, the hope of the pill is that
anyone who has suffered a traumatic experience and suffers from
post-traumatic stress disorder can work with a psychiatrist, take one
of the pills and slowly forget the episode.
Victims of rape, eye witnesses to brutal crimes and soldiers of war are examples of possible patients.
Part of the study and development of the drug is researching how long it takes for short-term memory to become long-term memory.
“We know that if you encode something very deeply, if you make it
meaningful, then you will encode it into memory faster,” Dr. Dayna R.
Touron, an assistant psychology professor and director of Appalachian’s
Adult Cognitive Lab, said.
According to the online article, Propranolol, which was first developed
to fight high blood pressure, has an effect on hormone adrenaline and
is now being studied to test memory.
“Anything that’s an upper will increase your intentional capacity,”
Touron said. “Anything that increases attention increases memory. It
doesn’t seem plausible to me that adrenaline would really play a role
in coding a memory, although it could heighten your attention or
awareness of things.”
When deciding on what memories a person remembers and what memories
they do not, this new drug could raise a lot of ethical questions.
“The real ethical issue here is related to individual identity,” Dr.
Jesse Taylor, associate philosophy and religion professor, said. “We
think of a person as a set of experiences; to wipe one of them out is
like saying, ‘It wasn’t me.’”
Taylor also questions the mental capabilities of a person right after they’ve experienced a traumatic event.
“If you want the pill, you’re going to say you want it when the
experience is still in short-term memory. During this time, you may be
upset or angry,” Taylor said. “This is the worst possible time to make
a decision because you are more vulnerable and more prone to make a
mistake.”
Taylor suggests that if there is a certain situation where a person
will not be able to function normally again unless they take this pill,
the should have an agent to make that decision on their behalf.
Kyle H. Goelling, a junior English major and member of the Army
National Guard was stationed in Balad, northeast of Baghdad, from
February 2005 to December 2005.
“I suppose [a memory erasing pill is] a double-edged sword,” he said. “It could have its benefits, but it could also be abused.”
Although Goelling is part of the army, he said he has never experienced
something that would lead him to want to be prescribed to the medicine.
When asked if he would take the pill if he experienced something traumatic in war, he declined to comment.
The pill could be used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.
A victim of a traumatic event that erases that memory may be given the
opportunity to look towards the future, but they certainly do not have
the opportunity to look back, Taylor said.
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