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Conversation Lesson

Dan: Okay. This month, we’re talking Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of my favorite movies. You seen it?

Aaron: I haven’t, unfortunately. I will very soon, because putting together this lesson has really piqued my interest.

Dan: You know Jim Carey, right?

Aaron: Oh yeah, he’s a famous comedian. He’s pretty funny.

Dan: He’s a hilarious guy. He’s the main actor in this movie, but it’s not a comedy at all.

Aaron: It doesn’t sound like a comedy.

Dan: No. It’s a science fiction movie in the near future. One of the reasons that I really like science fiction is because good science fiction really makes us to reflect on ourselves and think about the human experience. By placing it in the future, we can examine who we are as people in a different way.

Aaron: Yeah. I’ve always found science fiction to be really interesting, because it really pushes us to examine possibilities. I’m kind of a positive, forward-looking person. I’m always looking for new possibilities. Science fiction stimulates my mind that way. It’s good.

I have a question for you about the story itself. It’s a love story, is it not? It’s a love story about a man and a woman. I’m just not exactly sure what happens. How do the memories get erased, and it what order does it take place?

Dan: It’s a little bit confusing if you haven’t seen the movie. Essentially, it’s a story of this couple, Joel and Clementine. They have a relationship two times. The first time, they meet and they fall in love. It ends badly. They break up. The memories are so painful that Clementine has the memories erased.

Aaron: Okay, through this company. I got it.

Dan: Joel doesn’t know about this, so Joel goes looking for her. He sees her kissing another man and she doesn’t remember him at all.

Aaron: Uh-oh.

Dan: He can’t understand what’s going on. He finds out later that Clementine had this medical procedure. She had the memories erased. He decides, I’m going to do it too.

Aaron: He goes ahead and does it.

Dan: Right, so now both of them have no memory of each other.

Aaron: But then they meet several years later on a train?

Dan: No. He takes the train to the beach, and he sees this woman that he thinks he’s never met her before.

Aaron: But he feels something.

Dan: Right, he feels an attraction to her. Really, he’s had a relationship with her. Both of them don’t remember this. He takes this train to the beach where he sees her. He doesn’t have the courage to talk to her. He leaves, he gets on the train to leave and go home. She happens to be on the train with him. She comes up to talk to him. They meet, and it feels like love at first sight. That starts off their second relationship. They think it’s love at first sight, but really, it’s the second time to have this romance.

Aaron: I see. Do they continue on with the romance, or is that the end of the movie?

Dan: That’s the end of the movie, so you have to guess what happens. Really, it’s bringing up all these questions about memory and how that shapes who we are. Will there be a future where we can manipulate and alter our memory, and how will that change us?

Aaron: Wow. It’s pretty interesting. How did this company actually remove memories?

Dan: I don’t remember the exact fantasy science they used. There is some interesting research they’re doing now about how to alter memories. That’s one of the things we talked about in the core audio. In the core audio, we talked about the Tet1 gene and these experiments where they were altering the Tet1 gene, and that had an effect on the memory of the mice.

Aaron: Were they altering the Tet1 gene, or removing the Tet1 gene altogether?

Dan: They were removing the Tet1 gene. Actually, I don’t really have a firm understanding of what a gene is. I know you’ve told me before.

Aaron: It’s a pair of pants you wear that’s made of denim.

Dan: Right, I prefer slacks.

Aaron: Oh, really. I have a few pairs of jeans, actually.

Actually, a gene is a strand of DNA. It’s not actually a strand of DNA. It’s a part of the strand of DNA. Its purpose is to provide a blueprint for the body to create proteins.

Proteins are really the building blocks of life. They form muscles and bones, and they also form enzymes. Proteins, they have lots of different activities in the body. In a way, we’re made up of proteins, but it’s the genes that provide the blueprint for the body to grow and develop, and to do things.

Dan: Those genes are like a map that direct how we grow?

Aaron: That’s right. Actually, I worked as a laboratory assistant in my younger years at the University of California. I worked for a molecular biologist. The research that was being done in the laboratory was on the Y-chromosome. That’s the genes that are specific for males. Those are the male gene. Only males have the Y-chromosome. We were doing things in the laboratory like cloning and DNA manipulation.

Dan: Wow.

Aaron: We were part of the genome project, mapping the actual Y-chromosome. That was a really interesting and stimulating experience for me. I learned a little bit about genes and RNA and DNA and how to measure what actually happens. It was very, very interesting. We were working with mice as well.

Dan: Maybe this story makes more sense to you. I understand the basics, which seems to be that they have found out that this Tet1 gene is responsible for the production of a certain kind of protein which affects memory. They’ve removed this Tet1 gene from mice in experiments and found that these mice aren’t able to create new memories that replace old memories.

Aaron: I see. They’re not able to create new memories that replace old memories.

Dan: Right.

Aaron: The presence of this Tet1 gene allows mice to adapt, essentially, over time to let certain memories fade so that they can adapt to new circumstances. I see.

Dan: Right. That seems to be the natural process for humans as well. Our memories aren’t fixed, or we wouldn’t be able to adapt and learn.

Aaron: I see. It seems to me that the Tet1 gene might be a focal point, or maybe the key to understanding how memories are not only created, but how we can actually erase memories, if that’s indeed possible.

Dan: Right, very possible. In this particular experiment, it was all about what are the effects of removing that natural process of the Tet1 gene producing these proteins. In this experiment, when the normal mice were put into a cage, given an electric shock, the connection, they made an associative memory. They would associate that cage with pain, with an electric shock. That would be the natural process of creating a memory which is an association. After that, over the course of time, they were put in that cage again over and over again with no shock, no electric shock. Then they started to form a new memory that the cage is no longer a signal for pain. They would not exhibit any signs of fear. They wouldn’t freeze and look scared. When they had the Tet1 gene removed, it didn’t matter how long they would experience that cage without an electric shock. They would continue to relive that experience, that fear experience. A shock’s coming. Electric shock’s coming. Pain’s coming.

Aaron: It seems like it’s a really important part of our ability to be able to handle painful experiences in the future. Interesting.

Dan: The big difference between that kind of research and the kind of the fantasy company in the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is, that company was able to target specific memories and erase them. For example, Clementine targeted the memories of Joel, and the company erased them. In this experiment, they’re not targeting memories for erasure.

Aaron: Erasing your genes.

Dan: Erasing your gene, erasing your memories. They are preventing the natural process of creating new memories on top of it.

Aaron: Interesting.

Dan: It’s quite different. It’s quite a much bigger, higher level jump that they’re making in the science fiction movie. Actually, there has been some research where they are targeting specific memories. Some people think that this movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I think it came out in the 90’s. A few years before that, there was some research with giving people who had Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

Aaron: You mean people who experienced really bad things, tragedies.

Dan: Right, victims of crimes.

Aaron: Soldiers.

Dan: Soldiers who had been to war, and that trauma from those memories. Anyways, how to help those people. They gave them this medication which inhibited the production of these proteins. It somehow stopped or slowed down the production of these proteins that are used to reinforce memories. This research with Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, it’s a little bit similar to the Tet1 gene. They’re both affecting proteins, but the Tet1 gene research is about stopping the ability to form new memories on top of old memories. This research for Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome is stopping the ability to strengthen old memories by remembering them.

Everything we remember a past event, we’re strengthening that memory. They’re now starting to believe that memories are connections between cells in the brain. By remembering that past event, we’re strengthening that connection.

Aaron: With some of the new technologies that they’re inventing in bioscience, maybe there are ways that we can weaken those connections, or possibly in the future, just remove select memories altogether. That raises a really interesting question for me. Memories really make us who we are. Without all of your memories, who are you? You won’t even know who you are. I think by changing memories, we’re really changing our identity. I wonder, is that a dangerous thing? Is that a good thing to do?

Dan: I see what you mean. I feel that we’re more than just our memories. I actually have a really poor memory. When I go home and I see my old buddies from high school, sometimes we’ll start telling stories from the old days. “Remember the time you did that crazy thing?” Sometimes, I’ll be like, “Are you sure? Was that really me?”

Aaron: “That was me?”

Dan: I can see that my memory is much weaker than my old buddies from high school, but I still feel that same connection to them. I still feel that I’m the same person. Actually no, I take that back. I don’t really feel that I’m the same person. I feel like I’m changing all the time. We’ve used that quote in an old lesson by Mahatma Gandhi, “Every night when I go to sleep, I die. Every morning when I wake up, I am reborn.” I think he’s talking about the mystery of sleep, but I think he’s also touching on the fact that we’re always changing. We’re always becoming new people.

But there is a danger to manipulating memories. Like we’ve talked about before, memories are what allow us to learn and have empathy. When we suffer …

Aaron: Hang on. You mean sympathy or empathy?

Dan: I mean empathy. I think we can have sympathy without experiencing pain. We can see someone else suffering and we can feel bad that they’re feeling bad. To empathize, of course, the difference between empathy and sympathy, empathy is to actually feel what they’re feeling. We can only do that if we’ve also felt that kind of suffering. I can have sympathy for people who have gone to war and they carry that heavy trauma, but I can’t empathize with it because I’ve never been to war.

Which actually brings up something I was thinking about. I was thinking about the Vietnam war. Of course, United States is a country that’s gone to war a lot. The Vietnam war may be the number one classic example of a war that was started that didn’t need to happen, that the US shouldn’t have been there. The country, as a whole, over time protested that war and brought it to an end. A big part of those protesters were soldiers who had been to Vietnam. They had seen, they had incredibly terrible, traumatic experiences. They came back and they told those stories. That gave the protesters more power. We’ve got soldiers on our side too, who are saying this is really terrible.

Imagine if all of those soldiers were able to erase all those memories, and they only brought back from Vietnam positive memories. Oh, I remember helping that Vietnamese village. They forgot about all the death and all the killing that they did.

Aaron: My father always told me when I was a kid, “Pain corrects.” In a way, it does because we listen to pain. We listen to pain. It’s a very strong signal. When we feel it, we need to adapt quickly and adjust and get away from that pain. Pain can also be a teacher. It can teach us. That’s my biggest concern about memory alteration or memory manipulation, is that if at any time we - and we all will, at some point - if we experience a traumatic event, to erase that memory removes the opportunity for us to work with it when it comes up and when it’s present. That ability to overcome pain and learn to let go of pain and learn to deal with pain helps us grow in wisdom and helps us grow in compassion, and to develop things like empathy that you mentioned.

That’s my biggest fear, is that we’ll outdo ourselves with technology. The technology will grow so quickly that we will use it in unwise ways. That’s my fear, is that the extreme will happen down the road, is that people will start just erasing everything painful and trying to avoid everything painful. As a species, as a global community, we will lose our ability to work with pain.

Dan: Yeah, we really could devolve on an emotional and wisdom level.

Aaron: That’s really interesting.

Dan: But then again, if I had a family member who had suffered some trauma and they weren’t able to work with it and had tried therapy, and they had tried meditation, and they weren’t growing from the experience, they were trapped in a loop of suffering, if that was the situation of somebody I loved, I would want them to access to medicine.

Aaron: Absolutely.

Dan: That could help them.

Aaron: Help them overcome the situation they’re in.

Yeah. Like every technology, I think it needs to be used wisely. My last question to you is, are there any painful memories you would like to erase, or would you like to continue living with those painful memories?

Dan: I think all the painful memories I have, I’ve grown from. I probably have some embarrassing memories, but those too.

Aaron: I have plenty of those.

Dan: Those too, those were all good learning experiences.

Aaron: That’s for sure!

Dan: What about you? Is there anything you would erase?

Aaron: No, I wouldn’t. Like yourself, I’ve been through a few difficult situations and certainly lots of embarrassing things that I’d like to go back and change. No. For me, it’s an important part of who I am. I’ve come to terms with all of that. There’s nothing I’d want to erase.

Having said that, I’ve been, in some ways, very lucky not to have experienced any great trauma or any great tragedy in my life. I just don’t know what that feels like.

Maybe my opinion would be different had I gone through a great trauma like some people in this world are going through right now.

Dan: Back to the topic we brought up of the trauma that soldiers bring home from them with a war, that’s a terrible thing that a lot of them carry with them for their whole lives. If you imagine if that was erased from the consciousness of soldiers, I wonder how many more wars would happen because of that…

Aaron: No one remembers.

Dan: Right.

Aaron: Something to think about.

Dan: Yeah.