Steve Ramirez

Memory manipulation means to either spark that memory back to life, or turning down the emotional volume of a particularly traumatic experience, or turning up the emotional volume of a particular positive experience that may have lost its luster over time.

Well, why?

Yeah, it's a good question.

I think there's at least two reasons why we would want to manipulate a memory.

The first is to understand how does memory work?

I mean, we can think of this as if you were to have a car at an auto shop, right?

And you are trying to figure out what's wrong.

You can hotwire the car or you can hit the accelerator.

You can listen to the carburetor, hear what happens to the engine.

You're tinkering with bits and pieces of the car so that it can tell on itself and let you know what could potentially be funky here.

It's the same thing with manipulating memories, where when we turn them on or off, for example,

we can begin listening in on what the rest of the brain and what the organism is doing.

And that lets us know a bit of what's working, like how does memory work for that matter?

The second reason is because we can turn on memories or turn off memories with the goal of restoring health to the brain.

And I think that's really the real reason why we're doing all of what we're doing, because we can imagine being able to turn on

A positive memory, for example, to try to alleviate symptoms associated with a given psychiatric disorder or to turn off a memory for the same reason as well.

So the goal here is to understand how does memory work and then can we use that knowledge to figure out how to restore health and well-being back to the brain that those memories exist in.

It's a little bit of both.

I think that the ideas that we're coming to terms with now about what memory is and what memory isn't, that is an everyday knowledge thing that I think is important for all of us.

So for example, we've known for a while that memories aren't,