To Remember, the Brain Must Actively Forget

The entire genome in each cell contains all of the genes for every type of cell in your body. In different types of cells and in different states certain genes are upregulated and downregulated. Essentially the process for turning a specific gene into the protein it codes for can be turned on or off. That is what is meant by an active vs inactive gene.

Note: the activity of a neuron and the activity of a specific gene (eg rac1) are two completely different kinds of activity. The first is electrochemical activity and the second is production activity. Where changes in production can change the physical number of receptors available for the electrochemcial process.

Tangential but interesting: There's a great Borges short story called Funes the Memorious, which imagines a man who could never forget anything. To remember the events of a day, he must spend an entire second day, going through it second by second.

https://marom.net.technion.ac.il/files/2016/07/Funes-the-Mem...

Relevant convo between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson (My choice of Italics highlights).

Below excerpt from A Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887.

——

My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”

“To forget it!”

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

“But the Solar System!” I protested.

“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

I remember sitting at a bar in a distant city in some other country one night, and the person next to me, who I had just met that day, suggested that we do a shot together. Now these shots were big, and it had already been quite the night, and I remember thinking, "If I do this shot, it's probably the last thing I'll remember tonight."

It was, but that's not the point of this anecdote. This experience gave me the idea for the premise of a sci-fi story: a drug which, once taken, has no affect on you whatsoever outside of one crucial impact, which is that whatever happens while you're on it, you won't remember once it wears off a few hours later.

The scientific findings related in this article seem to indicate that developing such a drug would be possible. Would people take it? I suspect they would, although I also suspect that it would lead to regrettable behaviour. (That is probably, in fact, its chief advantage.) What about you - would you take it?

Are experiences less meaningful if you don't remember them?

Passing time without any knowledge or memory is probably the main reason to be taking drugs in prison. Yours sounds like the perfect, side-effect free solution!