Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Screwitall

Researchers at Harvard and McGill are developing an amnesia drug that will eliminate painful memories. If you're one of the regular readers of this blog, I'm assuming that you're wondering what this will do to individual being, which exists in a temporal dimension- a durée- the largest part of which is memory. You're probably also wondering about the possible ill-effects if particularly despotic states can eliminate all memory of their atrocities. Or what this will mean for central concepts of human life, such as guilt and atonement, loss and eulogizing. So, most likely none of us are ever going to take Soma, or whatever it will be called. Now, I wonder if any of these questions have occurred to researchers at Harvard and McGill.

4 comments:

historyjen said...

Even more proof (as if more was necessary) of the primary importance of humanistic understandings (or whatever you want to call it) above all else.

Greg von Winckel said...

Didn't I already see this movie?

Holly said...

If you saw it with me, I don't remember. I took the treatment.

Rufus said...

The Von Winckels, ladies and gentlemen.

Jen- I think it does show the need for humanist questions, and it's definitely important for us to pose them.