Chapter 38. Squirrels, crows and a single frog
When our brain makes a memory, it’s not like making a cake. For one, the memory itself isn’t tangible. You can’t pick it up and hold it, and you certainly can’t eat it. People often talk about ‘having a bad memory’ like they talk about ‘having a bad back’ or ‘having bad eyesight’. Rather than being an object or a physical body part though, a person’s memory is a process; the process of remembering. And like all processes it can be changed. The process of remembering can be changed, and by that token so can the memories themselves. The market is flooded with a million and one methods ranging from herbal enhancers and hypnosis to borderline witchcraft, all claiming to improve your memory in exchange for a slice of your wealth.
For the same reasons the process of memory can be improved, it can also be deteriorated; or as Frank Gilbert liked to call it, “memory remoulding”.
At the time Frank became interested, the ability of beta blockers to dull the emotional memory of a trauma was an accepted, if not slightly sketchy piece of scientific fact. Beta blockers work by inhibiting the body’s normal sympathetic nervous system; they do this by blocking the binding of the stress hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine.
It had begun with tests on lab rats who were taught to associate the sound of a particular tone with a fear response. The tone would be played into the box containing the rats and after a few seconds, the box would be shaken vigorously and water sprayed onto the little rodents, causing them to scurry around the box in a panic. After a while, the rats learned to associate the sound of the tone with the chaos that was about to follow. Eventually, just playing the tone was enough to cause the rats to scurry for their lives around the box, such was the fearful association they’d now created with that particular sound. After being administered the beta blockers, the fear response in the rats disappeared completely, suggesting that either the traumatic, emotional element had been removed from the memory, or that the entire memory itself had been deleted.
Tests on humans soon followed, but on much more humane terms than those that the rats had endured. Subjects were taught to associate the image of a spider with slightly uncomfortable, but ultimately harmless electric shocks administered to them. Inevitably, before long most of the subjects were uncomfortable with the image of the spider without the shocks, even where no arachnophobic tendencies had previously been present. Half of the group was later given the beta blockers, whilst the other half took a placebo and their fear response to the spider image was measured through the force of their eye blinks. The eye blink can be measured with small wires placed under the eye that detect contraction of the eye muscles and send a signal to a computer. When people are afraid, they startle more and ultimately blink harder. This is called "fear-potentiated startle”. As expected, the group that took the beta blockers showed less of a startle response than the group that took the placebo, suggesting that the emotional element of the memory had been eradicated.
It wasn’t long before the project became shrouded in controversy around the ultimate purpose of the research. The rumour mill churned out stories of the government’s plan to create ruthless, armies of emotionless soldiers, void of conscience or regret; robotic human fighting machines on the military frontline, doing the country’s dirty work without fear of the government receiving hefty medical invoices to fix the post-combat trauma of the survivors.
Evolutionists quickly joined the debate, arguing that our built-in fear responses were the result of thousands of years of natural progression, teaching humans throughout the ages to store vital memories that reminded them to stay clear of ancient predators and beasts and in a more modern context, oncoming lorries, ruthless muggers and other potentially fateful situations. Toying with or removing these crucial memories would be disabling this self-protective instinct that had helped get the human race to where it is today. Devolution. Regression. The opposite of what nature intended.
It started as a side hobby. A trainee neurologist trying to hatch a theory in a field of much speculation, but very little concrete fact. Frank had tracked the development of the research with great interest, disappointed when the objections coming from various quarters eventually jammed the wheels of project, causing it to fall silently off the radar of the scientific community. Determined, and still believing that there was mileage in the findings so far; Frank launched a private and unsolicited study of his own. He quickly became hooked on the idea that if the beta blockers could completely strip a memory of its emotional attachments, then the raw mass of information and images that was left behind in the subject’s mind could be carved into a different memory entirely if the subject was nurtured with the right neuro-linguistic treatment. In other words, Frank believed that it was possible to convince the subjects that they had experienced things that they had not.
Even without the beta blockers, Frank had had some success in proving this to be true. One of his early experiments saw him take a group of 10 students to a nature reserve, where they were each given a camera and asked to take photographs of any wildlife they could find. At the end of the session, they were asked to hand their cameras back to Frank, who would go away and develop all the pictures. The group got back together the following week to discuss the exercise. Before the students arrived, Frank pinned 300 photos around the room; photos that the students believed were the ones they’d taken at the nature reserve. In actual fact, they were an entirely different set of photos that Frank had taken at the same nature reserve when he’d returned there the following day, armed with a camera and a van containing 3 chickens, a rabbit, a woodpecker and a pig; none of which were animals photographed by the students. All 10 students claimed to have taken at least one of the photographs, with some laying claim to several of them. 2 of the students distinctly recalled seeing the pig in the nature reserve, despite there being no pig of which to speak at the location. To Frank’s knowledge, there were no chickens there and there may well have been no woodpecker either. His experiment already a success, Frank’s final blow was to produce the real photographs taken by the students, which contained nothing more than a dull sequence of squirrels, crows and a single frog.
Fooling someone into thinking they remembered seeing a pig is something in itself, but as entertaining as he found it, Frank knew that it only proved part of a point. He spent the next 12 months nurturing similar tests, some involving beta blockers, which heightened the impact of the memory remoulding by voiding the emotional elements of the subjects’ recollections.
Frank’s next project was cigarette smokers; unleashing his ever-improving Neuro-Linguistic Programming skills, combined with a drug that Frank had named Crop (an enhanced version of the beta blocker that Frank had developed himself) to convince his subjects that they had never smoked in the first place. His patients would be bombarded with cleverly chosen words and loaded phrasing, which effectively brainwashed them into remoulding the memory once the beta blockers had done their job of removing all emotional attachment to cigarettes. It wasn’t long before word got around about this magic cure for the addiction and Frank had a queue of nicotine reliant acquaintances demanding his services. Reluctant to fall into a career as a fag shrink, Frank taught his techniques to Billy Masterton, a friend and fellow student, under a sort of franchise agreement that saw a cut of the takings go directly to Frank, with day to day patient management taken care of by Billy. Freed of the time burden and with a steady income to finance his other research, the deal suited the pair perfectly.
Things ticked over nicely for a few months with Frank amassing a modest little fortune in exchange for doing not much at all. Then in the August of 2006, Frank got the call that would set off a chaotic chain of events, ultimately leading him to this budget Argentine hotel room, where he now stood over an innocent, unconscious market-stall girl. A state sponsored research project was assessing alternative solutions to the country’s spiraling bill for its methadone program. By hook or by crook, they had discovered B
illy Masterton’s stop-smoking clinic and Billy in turn had pointed them to Frank. The noble idea of changing lives on a nationwide scale appealed to Frank’s scientific ambitions, even if the thought of a career as a smack shrink didn’t strike him as a destiny fulfillment. And so from spraying water at confused rats, Frank’s persistence had eventually led him on to the government founded ‘Two Steps Forward’ project, where he began adapting his methods to fit an entirely new purpose of making junkies forget that they were the desperate, pathetic little lowlifes that they were.