Would You Rather Not Know?
Drug Found That Can Erase Memories

I read in the Post-Dispatch last week that researchers in New York have found a drug that can erase memories in rats. This discovery may someday allow humans to rid themselves of the knowledge of unpleasant or emotionally devastating experiences by simply popping a pill.

I thought that drug already existed in liquid form. Isn't that one of the primary purposes of alcoholic beverages?

Granted, alcohol does have its share of side effects. For instance, excessive consumption can sometimes actually cause some of those unpleasant memories that you are trying to forget in the first place.

Another potential byproduct of medicating with beer and booze is that they often require frequent doses in ever increasing quantities to facilitate forgetting a memory that can lead to even more undesirable things such as DWIs.

Hopefully, the drug discovered by these researchers will not suffer from those side effects. Actually, I seriously doubt this technology will ever be perfected for the mass-market, and in many ways hope this breakthrough never leaves the lab.

I don't know about you, but I try to learn from my mistakes. If I do something stupid or have to deal with something I don't find pleasant at the time, forgetting all about it is usually not the appropriate answer.

Mistakes build both character and wisdom.

Many times you may not realize that the "mistake" you wish to forget, will guide you from not making that same mistake or a comparable gaffe again in the future.

If forgetting a memory was just as easy as popping a pill, then we're all destined to constantly repeat bad judgment.

For instance, if this pill had existed in 1986 I might have been tempted to take one after paying very good money to see the very, very bad movie "Off Beat" starring Judge Reinhold when it premiered locally at the Town Plaza Cinema.

The movie was so bad, that I vowed never to watch another film starring Mr. Reinhold if I could possibly help it and with only a couple exceptions -- the Beverly Hill's Cop sequels and the Santa Clause movie -- I've been true to my word.

But if a pill capable of erasing painful memories had existed back then, I might have been tempted to pop one to help eradicate 92 minutes of bad acting burned into my brain.

And while I would have had short-term solace -- being completely oblivious to the fact that I had just wasted nearly 2 hours of my time watching this piece of Hollywood refuse -- I would not have benefited from the learned knowledge that both the movie and its star were a big waste of my time.

Instead, because of this memory drug, whenever any Judge Reinhold movie would come on, I would think fondly of the first Beverly Hills Cop movie and say to myself "that Judge Reinhold fellow was pretty good with Eddie Murphy, so I bet this movie is OK too" only to be sadly disappointed and disgusted to the point that I would find myself medicating with yet another of these memory-erasing pills to forget the slop I had just witnessed.

Thanks to this lobotomy-in-a-pill, I would remain blissfully ignorant of any unpleasantness that occurred to me.

But that's not life.

I don't want my memories to be like a rat on an exercise wheel with an unrealistic Pollyanna view of the world I live in, only remembering the good and never the bad.

I don't want to not know that movies starring Judge Reinhold tend to suck and suck badly.