Even when I was young I wanted the ability to delve into my mind and remove painful, or embarassing, memories. I imagined a soldering iron, cauterising the offending part of the brain.
As you get older, the capacity for being embarassed diminishes, but still there’s a desire to erase the painful… like in the wonderful film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind.
Well maybe that will happen one day… on Radio 4′s Today programme this morning they were talking about using it to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, but it’s hard to imagine it not being used for other reasons, like the removal of painful love…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8586000/8586523.stm