# Brain-Updating Machinery May Explain False Memories

This New York Times article, I hope, will spur all concerned members of the anti-involuntary experimentation and justice for MKULTRAs groups to renew their vigorous, militant, public attempts to get public attention focussed on these atrocities while we still can!

MKULTRA, psycho-electronic, and all child sex abuse perpetrators (all perps, actually) will just LOVE the existence of this technology to shoot down charges against them in court.

Eleanor White

    THIS IS OF EQUAL INTEREST TO MKULTRA SURVIVORS:

    ------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
    From:          Don Gillies
    To:            Eleanor White
    Subject:       Brain-Updating Machinery May Explain False Memories
    Date:          Thu, 28 Dec 2000 16:21:20 -0700

    Brain-Updating Machinery May Explain False Memories
                  September 19, 2000
                  By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------

    Scientists may have found a biological reason to explain why two
    people who witness the same event will, years later, often have
    different memories of what happened.

    It seems that every time an old memory is pulled into
    consciousness, the brain takes it apart, updates it and then makes
    new proteins in the process of putting the memory back into
    long-term storage. The fact that new proteins are made means that
    the memory has been transformed permanently to reflect each
    person's life experiences 97 not the memory itself.

    The finding is based on research involving a specific kind of fear
    memory in animals, but many experts predict that it may also hold
    true for other kinds of memories in humans. They also say that the
    discovery could lead to ways of altering or erasing people's
    memories.

    The research, carried out at the Center for Neural Science at New
    York University, was described in the Aug. 17 issue of the journal
    Nature. This is the first good neurobiological explanation of the
    way memories are updated, said Dr. Daniel Schacter, a Harvard
    psychology professor and a memory expert. "It's a mistake to think
    that once you record a memory, it is forever fixed," he said.

    Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist who studies memory at the
    University of Washington in Seattle, said: "This is very
    interesting research. We're on the brink of being able to figure
    out how you might accomplish something like memory engineering."

    It may be possible to erase traumatic memories in people who are
    plagued by them, she said, and to better understand how false
    memories are implanted into people's minds when they are given
    suggestions that they want to believe.

    [Eleanor White: It may also be possible to erase memories people
    want to KEEP, and which enable them to maintain resistance to
    oppressive government using memory erasure technology!]

    It has been known for at least 100 years that newly formed memories
    are initially unstable, said Dr. Yadin Dudai, a neurobiologist at
    the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.  A bump on
    the head, an electric shock or certain drugs can disrupt the
    process that gradually turns short-term memories into long-term
    memories through the production of new connections and protein
    synthesis in memory circuits.

    In the 1960's, researchers showed that certain drugs could
    interfere with the recall of memories, he said, but the research
    did not get very far because the drugs affected the entire brain
    and could not be traced to cellular mechanisms in memory networks.

    Dr. Karim Nader and Dr. Glenn Shafe, research assistant professors
    at N.Y.U., carried out the new experiments on memory recall in ways
    that reveal those cellular mechanisms with much greater precision.
    In a process called fear conditioning, they simultaneously played a
    tone and delivered an electric shock to the feet of caged rats.
    Later, when the rats heard just the tone, they froze; they had
    learned to be afraid.

    Researchers know exactly how and where this fear memory is
    hardwired in the rat's amygdala, a part of the brain that processes
    emotions.

    If the rat's amygdala is injected with a drug that blocks protein
    synthesis shortly after fear conditioning, it does not acquire
    long-term memory of the fear, Dr. Shafe said.

    But if the drug is injected six or more hours later, the memory is
    not blocked; the brain has made new proteins to consolidate and
    store the memory.

    For six hours or so the memory is what scientists term "labile" 97
    open or sensitive to some kind of manipulation. After this period,
    the memory is firmly in place.

    "I was bored with these experiments," Dr. Nader said. "I began
    thinking, what happens to a memory when you remember it? It would
    be so cool if it became labile again." He proposed a new
    experiment: animals would be trained to associate the tone with the
    electric shock.  The researchers would wait a day or more for the
    fear memory to consolidate. Then they would present the animal with
    the tone (to retrieve the memory) and a drug that blocks protein
    synthesis.

    "I said the drug would have no effect" on past learning, Dr. Shafe
    said. If anything, the animal's fear memory should be stronger
    because the drug could deter the animal from learning that a tone
    was not necessarily associated with a shock and that would
    reinforce the original fear memory. The two scientists bet a
    cocktail on the outcome.  A few weeks later, Dr. Nader won a
    cosmopolitan.

    "My jaw just hit the floor when I saw the result," he said. Instead
    of freezing at the tone, the rats scarcely reacted. It means
    memories become labile and open to revision every time they are
    recalled, Dr. Nader said. And new proteins have to be made before
    the memories are put back into storage.

    Both researchers emphasized that this finding was only a first step
    in exploring the biology of how the brain consolidates and
    manipulates memories. It is not known if much older and more
    established memories are open to editing or if this mechanism is
    restricted to fear memories alone.

    Why evolution would choose a strategy that permits memories to be
    highly malleable is an interesting question. Memories need to be
    reliable to guide behavior, but they also need to be open to new
    information.

    In the long run, these findings may be used clinically to erase
    traumatic memories, Dr. Loftus said. A patient would recall the
    troubling event and be given a drug or other agent to disrupt the
    memory from being reconsolidated.

    The research also sheds light on false memories, she said. If a
    recalled memory is open to revision, incorrect as well as correct
    information can be woven into the fabric of a memory. Once that
    happens, a person has no way of knowing what is true or not true.
    Yet people put faith in their memories to guide their decisions,
    she said.

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