Memories

The Neuroskeptic, writing at the blog of the same name at Discover, suggests that a recent experiment which appears to indicate that the memories of one snail can be transferred to another via the injection of RNA material needs some more work.

Among the other problems is that the test snail's "memory" that was transferred might simply have been an increased sensitivity response instead of an actual memory. Given what passes for brains in snails, this makes sense. I may be misunderstanding, but I think the Neuroskeptic is saying that the transfer is more like the body developing an allergy after being injected with tissue from someone's else who has that allergy. Probably best for the people involved, too, as the method of training the snail to recoil from touch -- the memory that us supposed to have been passed on -- involved electric shocks. And as the 1957 movie The Monster That Challenged the World showed us, mollusks (of which snails are one) are very vicious creatures when riled and enlarged to hundreds of times their normal size.

The Neuroskeptic's caution is kind of a bummer. I was figuring on seeing if I could get some memories injected into me so that I could understand those math classes that ate my lunch in high school. On the other hand, I could foresee members of the Kardashian clan selling their RNA for injection so people could have memories of being famous, meaning that they would be famous after doing even less than a Kardashian did to deserve it.

I was also sort of hoping that the technique might lead to the development of its opposite as well, in which we could have memories completely removed. The aforementioned Kardashians are on that list (I would, in fact, argue for laws that made the treatment mandatory). So is most of what Elizabeth Warren or Sean Hannity has ever said. And the horrible sight of my 2016 presidential ballot, asking me to select the electors for either Donald J. Trump or Hillary R. Clinton. Sure, there was also the choice of selecting electors for Gary Johnson, and that's the choice I made. But those other two? Brother, that's one abyss that gazes back at you hard and it's a memory I'd rather paper over and forget it's there.