Memory Owies. Sleepless Nights. Intuition.
More BioTech Futures...
"If there were a pill you could take after experiencing a painful or traumatic event that would permanently weaken your memory of what had just happened, would you take it?"
The Memory Pill
But maybe you already have a few of these packed in your home first-aid/trauma kit?
Or in the medicine cabinet alongside provigil, another nifty little chemical enhancement that seems to actually allow you to skip 2 or 3 days of sleep with no ill-effects or sleep deficit. So if you gain back 1 day (16 hours) in every 3, does this mean you can live 9 days a week while everyone else is living 7? Personally, I enjoy sleep, particularly naps, but it would be nice to have an option where I could pack in 40 hours straight on a project or research without paying for it days afterwards.
To have this option though, you'd need to convince a doctor you were narcoleptic. There is a curious taboo on people using chemistry to actually enhance their lives instead of fix what's broken.
And what about a pill that increased intuition ---but did so at the cost of inhibiting short-term memory? Would it help you win in Vegas or just cause you forget what you'd lost? I dunno, but this is the era of experimenting with dark matter of human neurology and dna. Hang on for the ride!
People are often afraid of things that they don't understand. And a lot of these people are also the people who vote and run our government. Which I believe would cause some of the "curious taboos" that you were talking about.
ReplyDeletePersonally I don't think we need pills or things like that to accomplish what you were talking about. A lot of people in traumatic events already don't remember much about what happened. I think it's an automatic block that happens if the event is bad enough so the person isn't crippled.
Also, the sleep thing... Not sure what to say about that, you may not have any active side-effects from taking some pills but then again there aren't many active effects from smoking a couple cigarettes :P It's the passive ones you want to watch out for.
-Skry
Ya, good points Skrylar, thanks. Responses to traumatic events vary, propranolol is being proposed for things like PTSD where the memory of the events continue to disrupt a person's well-being over time. Of course, there are also other ways to address this at a cognitive/behavioral level; so the tone was somewhat tongue-in-cheek :-)
ReplyDeleteAll of these drugs are new, so nobody knows the long term side-effects. Even when side-effects are well known it seems people tend to ignore them or opt to treat them as trade-offs to immediate pleasures (see the Diabetes article ;-)
If I could live my normal life span (137 years), and feel rested the whole time, I would probably only choose to sleep once or twice a year.
ReplyDeleteIf that drug DOES hit the population, and DEA finds out it takes water to make it...better stock up on it, they'll have the FDA ban water and restrict purchase of water like they did with the ONLY effective cold/asthma medication...ephedrine.
Since THEY (DEA) did not have the authority to have its use/purchase stopped, they bullied the FDA into finding it harmful to the health (and by the way ..leave out the part where the ones harmed by it had taken over 1000 mg doses).
You may be onto something with the water stuff; I hear the FDA is claiming gravity is a medical device now so trampolines are going to be outlawed...
ReplyDeleteCourse, even though it's illegal to fly with water these days, I smuggled about 16oz on board once by drinking it beforehand ;-)