Interesting and memory-related, but not specifically relevant, so sticking in 'Community' section:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podca … t-09-09-04

Young brains can forget painful memories, but old ones tend not to. An animal study in the journal Science finds that it may be possible to restore the old brain to its younger, more pliable state. Karen Hopkin reports.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/ … 2009-09-03

Can fearful memories be erased?

" ... The drug cuts the net into its pieces," Gogolla says, "just like when you cut the strings of a net and it falls apart." Then, for a couple weeks, the original youthful plasticity in the neuronal circuits of the amygdala is regained and any bad memory formed after the matrix digestion could be subsequently eliminated through "extinction" therapy, a common treatment during which a patient is presented with the original fear trigger but in a context that is not fearful. When the treatment was given after a mouse underwent fear conditioning, however, extinction was unable cut out that memory completely... "

Bonus: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/mag … t_thompson

Remembering Not to Remember in an Age of Unlimited Memory

"For most of human history, almost everything people did was forgotten, simply because it was so hard to record and retrieve things. But there was a benefit: "Social forgetting" allowed everyone to move on from embarrassing or ill-conceived moments in their lives.

Digital tools have eliminated that amnesty. Google caches copies of our blog postings; social-networking sites thrive by archiving our daily dish. Society now defaults to a relentless Proustian remembrance of all things past.

The downsides are obvious. We live with a nagging fear that something we say or do online will come back to haunt us years later. (Just ask anyone who's been Google-vetted at the start of a relationship.) "We become enormously more cautious with what we say or do," says Mayer-Schönberger. And society suffers when people stop taking risks.

So what's the solution? Mayer-Schönberger argues that we need to stop creating tools that automatically remember everything. Instead, we need to design them to forget."

Last edited by ruiner (2009 September 04, 9:50 am)