"I can't see much of a downside for this potential drug"
Really? The brain is one of the most complex organs in the human body. It is also a finite resource. There is a very high probability that increasing performance on one area will have complex side effects in other areas.
I think the author of the blog post meant that given the drug a) works in humans and b) is determined to be 'safe' by some level of metrics, she doesn't see the downside to remembering visual memories for much longer. I don't think it's fair to leave it to bloggers to assess the dangers of a neurological drug.
No, I don't think it's obvious. We forget things for a reason; increasing the level of noise in the human mind doesn't just come with no side effects. Even if the drug works perfectly as intended, not having the ability to forget memories that are irrelevant can be a big disadvantage I'd think.
I don't think you can proceed from "we forget things" to "it's good that we forget things." We get cancer.
However, a decade and a half on the internet is enough to convince me that the ability to let certain visual memories fade into oblivion is a good thing.
This would definitely be a drug for which the new FDA requirements of searching for psychiatric side effects during clinical trials would be of crucial importance. Quite a few drugs have turned out to have unexpected psychiatric side effects in recent years that didn't turn up during animal testing. Rimonabant
is an example of a drug that at first sounded like it had no downside, only upside, when it was released, but it has been withdrawn from the market now that its dangerous side effects have been discovered. Rimonabant is not the only recent example like that. The human brain is a very complicated, interacting biochemical system, and drugs that were believed to be harmless have often been shown to have severe psychiatric side effects.
Thanks to the other participants who have already mentioned examples of strong visual memory storage not having fully beneficial effects in actual patients.
"In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it...It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front)."
Interesting. But what causes such memory in real life may also create a limited ability for abstraction. That capacity for abstraction may or may not be affected by this method of enhancing memory. It may very well be that enhanced memory by itself necessarily results in a loss in ability for abstraction, but this would have to be investigated.
She described her life as like a split-screen television, with one side showing what she is doing in the present, and the other showing the memories which she cannot hold back.
"Some memories are good and give me a warm, safe feeling.
But I also recall every bad decision, insult and excruciating embarrassment. Over the years it has eaten me up. It has kind of paralysed me."
> I can't see much of a downside for this potential drug, unless the act of not forgetting what you see causes problems or trauma.
Many years ago I read about a professional gambler with photographic memory who was unfortunate to be caught in a deadly casino fire. Since the fire, he was unable to enter another casino because he would be flooded with perfectly horrific visuals of the deadly fire.
I can't see much of a downside for this potential drug
Amazing that the author of a sci-fi blog would say this; such a drug could feed the premises of a dozen short stories or Twilight Zone episodes -- and many would have dark endings. (Perhaps this was really her intent, to trigger fun scare stories in comment threads.) Examples:
You could remember a good experience so well you spend your whole life trying in vain to reproduce it.
You could remember a bad experience so well it paralyzes you.
Your initial advantage could go through phases of benefit and detriment, ultimately be so isolating you're completely alone, and then be reversed (a little like 'Flowers for Algernon').
There could be an ironic turn (blinded just after gaining perfect visual memory; 'Time Enough at Last').
You could, imperceptibly at first, lose other valuable skills in proportion to the memory gain. Social abilities; judgement; empathy. The irony would be you can't even remember the dimensions of life you've lost -- they're no longer perceptible compared to the eidetic perfection.
This is one of the few places I think I would actually prefer a technological solution, rather than bioengineering. Given the scifi-prophesied implanted visual and aural enhancements, I would like to be able to search my stored memories, giving me a much better signal-to-noise ratio.
In no way would I want this. Perhaps I'm just being that old guy on the porch complaining about technology, but I happen to like my innate ability to forget things.
I come from an extremely forgetful and absentminded family, and so it is a constant struggle to keep 'important' things in the brain. But the benefits of it by far outweigh the drawbacks (which usually come in the form of late fees and only 1 arrest :).
The brain needs to wash things down the drain to make room for new stuff. While medically we might be able to prove this is not damaging, I can only think I'd get a little crazy having so many details in me. How can we say it's not damaging when we know so little about how the brain works?
I am skeptical of anything like this, because if it were so awesome to just goose the production of one protein and suddenly gain some new awesome cognitive power, evolution would have already selected for it, in all probability.
The flip side is that our current environment is very different than it was even a thousand years ago, and what was disadvantageous then may be an advantage today, but this turns out to be a very tricky determination to make.
Redesigning the human body is hard. Almost by definition, it's already largely in a local optima; presumably it isn't entirely, but finding the path out in the horrifically multidimensional space of possible enhancements is non-trivial, in the dry-mathematician-humor sense of the word "non-trivial".
Evolution is not the process of selecting for traits you think are awesome, it's the process of selecting for traits that lead to more offspring. The fact that this particular protein hasn't been naturally amped to the max just means photographic memory may not be as important a part of getting laid as you might hope.
Really? The brain is one of the most complex organs in the human body. It is also a finite resource. There is a very high probability that increasing performance on one area will have complex side effects in other areas.