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But the idea that memories can be edited, softened or dialled down, is more than a little discomfiting to some, and not just for what it means for eyewitness testimony. “We’re not reliable narrators when it comes to some details, and sometimes even entire scenarios,” Ramirez says. More profoundly, without good and bad memories it’s hard to imagine how we would know how to behave, says Dr. Judy Illes, professor of neurology and Canada Research Chair in neuroethics at the University of British Columbia.

Learning doesn’t occur without memory. How do we learn from a bad relationship, if we can’t remember it? “And so now, if we pre-select what memories stick and don’t stick, it almost starts to be like the eugenics of memory,” Illes says. “We ought to think carefully about that.”

She has absolutely no qualms about using memory manipulation for people suffering desperately from post-traumatic stress disorder, people whose burden of suffering from horrifying experiences exceeds any moral argument against using it.

“To me, a PTSD that is profound and debilitating is like a disease of any other and, to the extent that we can have an intervention that treats it, we should vigorously pursue it.”

Even the heartbroken recruited for Brunet’s study were experiencing symptoms congruent with PTSD. We’re geared to form attachments, he says, and not so much to detach.

But memory manipulation has a slippery slope. Would it bleed into not-so-disabling disorders? If someone misbehaves at a cocktail party and would really sooner forget what happened, is that an appropriate use? Isn’t it good to be embarrassed by your past behaviour, to keep you from doing it again? What about war fighters, asks Illes. “If we had a drug that can mitigate a bad memory, could we possibly use it in advance of an act to actually preventa memory from forming, and therefore enable people to fight less fearfully, and more fiercely, because there’s no consolidation of the acts of crime, or acts of war?”