Many people are interested in the question of whether it is possible to erase a person’s memory. At the peak of the popularity of the film "Men in Black", many began to wonder how to do this. And, as massive research in this direction shows, this is easy to do if you apply effective techniques.
- What is memory?
- Artificial forgetting or reconsolidation
Forgetting as a natural process
Most likely, many have seen the film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” where the company was engaged in erasing events using a special program. This method would be a real salvation for many, but in reality everything happens a little differently.
As time passes, intense emotions and feelings, spoken words, committed actions and deeds lose their colors and begin to seem too distant and completely unimportant.
If we talk about amnesia, this is the same example where it passes naturally, but takes a specific period: years, or maybe even decades. But you can forget a loved one who was very important to you in the same way.
If you broke up with your lover, then time will also help erase the person from your memory. After all, the sensations and pleasant moments experienced together gradually fade. This especially happens when there is a replacement.
The process is subject to a certain strategy. First you need to allow yourself to forget the details of the event, and then delete the entire memory.
Types of amnesia
I will describe such a loss from the medical side. There are several of its manifestations:
- Retrograde. Everything that happened before the onset of the disease is forgotten.
- Anterograde. The patient cannot remember what happened to him and around him since the onset of the disease. This usually occurs after a serious injury or stressful situation. Often he can remember what happened before. But sometimes this direction develops together with the previous one.
- Fixation. Occurs when a person cannot remember new information and store it.
- Traumatic. Occurs after severe or moderate traumatic brain injury. Is temporary.
- Dissociative. In this case, the brain removes memories from personal life, but leaves skills and abilities. Can be localized, generalized, continuous and selective.
- Children's room. The most common type, existing in almost everyone. This manifests itself when there is no way to remember what happened in early childhood.
Causes
Before you understand how to get amnesia, you should understand its source. There are enough reasons for this and they are all divided into 2 categories: organic and psychogenic.
The first group includes:
- Traumatic brain injuries - severe bruises, concussions. The patient can talk about what happened before the injury, but the moment of its receipt and beyond is already lost.
- Acute pathological disease of the central nervous system or brain - ischemia, tumor, circulatory disorder, stroke.
- Alcohol or drug poisoning. It often happens that after alcohol abuse, in the morning you don’t remember what happened yesterday. Consciousness is confused, and the condition is accompanied by tremors.
- Taking medications that have a strong effect on the psyche: antidepressants, sleeping pills.
The psychogenic category includes:
- severe stress or psychological trauma;
- emotional shock;
- illnesses of this nature;
- epilepsy.
In most cases, forgetfulness occurs during a stressful situation when the brain tries to remove bad moments.
Psychologist Daria Milai
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Is it possible to erase a person's memory?
The brain part of the body is responsible for this function. Thanks to it, information is remembered, stored and reproduced. However, with all the latest technologies and brilliant successes in the scientific world, this topic has been studied rather poorly.
Conducted research and experiments have not given scientists a clear answer to how this property works and what its principles are. Methods for partial or complete removal of memories cannot be predicted. Therefore, it is highly not recommended to use memory erasing in solving problems.
However, such a phenomenon does exist. In science it is known as amnesia. This is not an isolated disease, but only a consequence of certain disorders in the body. Which ones I have already described above.
I will only add that external catalysts, such as serious injuries, are also unpredictable and can cause damage to physical and mental health, as well as lead to tragic consequences. Internal reasons related to human psychology, in turn, provide hope for recovery, and with effort, the process can be made controllable.
Stress Process
Processing stress provides an opportunity to avoid injury and release pent-up energy. For example, trembling, crying and screaming allow a person to physically process stress. However, if the stress response is not processed, it remains in the tissues of our body.
When subsequent unpleasant events occur that do not pose a serious threat, the traumatic memory recalls this stress reaction. As a result, large amounts of stress hormones are released.
Blood rushes to the extremities, pupils dilate, muscle tone increases, breathing rate increases, heart rate increases, and sweating increases. That is, the nervous system reacts as if this small incident really threatens your life. This biological reaction is not subject to rational control.
The brain stem (the most primitive part of the brain) controls emotional experience and biological response. When the brain stem is activated by the fight-or-flight response, it begins to override the more developed part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. Therefore, when the fight or flight response is activated, it is impossible to think rationally and critically (as if the prefrontal cortex was involved).
How to deliberately lose memory: the possibility of artificially acquiring amnesia
In this case, the individual may want to get rid of a specific negative memory, erase a difficult period. Let’s say right away that this is possible, but it is unknown which areas will be affected. For example, you can use hypnosis. But its result depends entirely on the skills of a specialist who can remove unpleasant emotions from the past. Moreover, this method is absolutely safe.
On some sites, the list is supplemented with such options as intentional injury, intoxication, and taking medications that can cause amnesia. But such options are dangerous to health, and most importantly human life, and can cause death. Therefore, be as careful as possible if you want to erase your memory at home.
If the problem is really serious and bad memories do not allow you to live normally, then it is better to consult a psychologist. In my consultations, I will help you deal with negative emotions, and you will be able to sleep peacefully at night again.
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Contact a professional: free yourself from negativity with the help of a specialist
Elena Kalachikova is a professional memory development trainer, head of the Shaleniy Ravlik school, a teacher of the highest category with sixteen years of experience. Elena works with children from 5 years old, schoolchildren, students, adults, foreigners and people of retirement age. The trainer claims that he knows everything about memory and can easily teach not only to remember the necessary information, but also to forget negative experiences.
Elena guarantees forgetting negative information using the image of water, rubber band or fire, and also uses the method of repeatedly speaking out an unpleasant situation. We will be glad to see you at the Shaleniy Ravlik school. There is strength in everyone!
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- Training memory and attention, “Komsomolskaya Pravda”, June 2014 Publication in the newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda”.
- Game "PHOTOGRAPHER" Game "PHOTOGRAPHER" for training visual and photographic memory.
Does it make sense to get rid of events?
The main motivators for resorting to this process are traumatic events: crimes, accidents, loss of a loved one. Such an experience can drive you into a depressive state, provoke insomnia and prevent you from leading a calm life.
It is impossible to lose your memory forever, but for a while, yes. For this, various techniques are used, including hypnosis, which I will talk about in more detail a little later.
You can also do this yourself with some effort. An unpleasant situation, first of all, must be accepted. Try to understand why it arose. Perhaps if you survived a disaster and survived, this will be the path to self-knowledge. Despite the fact that the phenomenon was terrifying, you are alive - and this is already good.
Any negative event is a life lesson that gives experience. Taking advantage of it helps to remove bad feelings and emotions and thus stop releasing them.
However, in seeking knowledge of how to create amnesia, it is important to understand that deleting an episode from the past will lead to changes in you as a person.
How to proceed
It is unlikely that you will be able to completely escape from memories. Perhaps you should act according to the saying “I can’t forget, but I can forgive.” If what happened was traumatic, try to let it go.
You definitely cannot go back in time and change what has already happened. But today you still have the power to influence your own life.
About memory
The memory process is very flexible and the brain itself perfectly determines what information is important to remember, for example, preparing a simple dish to eat, and what can be forgotten - background information.
And, perhaps, the best ways to remember something: become interested, give importance and repeat. We remember well the vital moments, what we repeat regularly and, of course, what interests us, our hobbies.
It turns out that it is important to act in the opposite way: to be indifferent, to forget and not to remember.
On the other hand, the healthy state of the brain and the normal production of neurotransmitters also play an important role. Just think about age-related decline in intelligence, amnesia and memory loss in super-stressful conditions or trauma.
We don’t care what you want to forget, let’s move on to practice.
Known methods
In science, a combination of such methods is called “reconsolidation”. There are several options for getting amnesia at home.
Hypnosis
The process is based on the ability of the human body to process received information naturally. With its help, harmony and balance of the mental organization are achieved.
After all, when a person encounters a phenomenon that is traumatic in nature, her brain cannot always process this situation at the neurophysiological level. It’s as if he puts up a barrier, hiding data in dark corners, but still periodically returns to it. This causes psychological problems.
The hypnosis practitioner seeks to remove this blockage. It evokes in the patient painful emotions associated with an unpleasant event so that the brain can adapt these images.
Meanwhile, memory, conceptualized as a flexible system, generates new memories of what happened in the past. As a result, what previously seemed negative and caused pain is transformed into experience and gradually forgotten.
NLP programming
This is a category in psychology that studies ways to influence a person's opinion, memorable moments and will. The impact is carried out thanks to psychotechnics and special training. Exercises help process information for further assimilation, but in a new way.
Thus, through neurolinguistic influence, it is not the memories themselves that disappear, but the feelings and emotions associated with them.
Replacement data
Creating false situations in your head is a common procedure. The brain can form them itself, trying to recreate a complete picture of the event, especially if some of its details have not been preserved.
But such thoughts can be instilled artificially. The implantation process is about using your imagination as much as possible, to the maximum extent possible. Meanwhile, the contour between the memory function and fantasy begins to blur. This method is best suited for trusting individuals who are easily suggestible.
Chemical intervention
This is a rather dangerous option for how to delete memory. After all, the drugs will not affect a specific event. Their effect extends to all brain activity, making it impossible to predict the outcome of the process.
Medicines stop the functioning of protein kinase, an enzyme responsible for memories. Neural connections are weakened, and the ability to keep past events in mind is lost. Such a drug, for example, is scopolamine. This is a narcotic substance used before anesthesia, and also as a sedative or antidepressant.
What is memory?
A person receives a lot of information throughout his life. There is a theory that even those memories and sensations that we received while in the womb can subsequently influence our life and the formation of our personality. What is memory? This is not a book in which absolutely all emotions, knowledge or sensations are recorded. This is a living phenomenon during which certain neural connections arise and then disappear in the cerebral cortex. The very first connections to disintegrate are those that are not activated or are activated extremely rarely. Simply put, this is information that we do not use.
It rarely happens that the process of forgetting becomes a defensive reaction of the body. Traumatic information is removed by memory, destroying negative emotions along the way. This is why, for example, children forget that they were raped. This reaction is triggered in cases where the event is associated with severe fear. This phenomenon is called reconsolidation.
Even with such a mechanism for protecting the psyche, although information fades into the background, moving into fictitious images, the nervous disorder caused by real fear will remain. If you look in history or folklore, you will find a lot of evidence of this: the abduction of people by elves-witches, and now by aliens. The memory was replaced, but the feeling of fear remained.
How to induce amnesia at home
To do this, you can use lightweight algorithms from the field of NLP. But effectiveness depends on:
- suggestibility;
- insignificance of events;
- lack of prejudice.
If, due to traumatic emotions, the psyche is disturbed, then it is necessary to consult a psychologist. Self-medication can only make the problem worse.
Temporarily
The most effective way to temporarily lose memory is to stress your own nervous system. For example, try an extreme sport, travel, decide on important tasks in the service. All this will help fill the brain with a lot of feelings and new information. In the meantime, he will assimilate and process it, then he will stop paying attention to unpleasant moments.
Forever
When a joyful event happens in life, you can tirelessly tell your friends and family about it. For the first time, a flurry of positive emotions will fall on you, and from the fifth - they will fade, after the tenth - the story will no longer seem so interesting and significant.
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Try this on bad memories too. After all, as long as we forbid ourselves to think about them, they appear before us in a terrible light. But once you scroll through it in your head, look at it from different angles, the fear will go away, and your view of what happened will change dramatically.
Exercises
I offer a number of trainings to help cope with the problem.
"Visualization"
Imagine negative moments in the form of dust sticking to your body. And then mentally pour water on yourself to wash away this dirt and, thereby, cleanse your consciousness.
Another option is to write down the event in detail on paper and burn it. Try to go into detail to “pull out” the negative feeling from yourself. If there is an object that reminds of a traumatic event, the memory can be buried.
"Perception"
The technique is to understand the situation like an episode from a movie:
- Play it through your head, putting yourself in the shoes of each participant.
- Do the same, but imagining that you are looking at the screen, change the playback speed from low to high.
- Color the picture in different colors: blue, greenish, red.
- Change the size of those participating in the dialogue.
Experience shows that this reduces the significance of the moment and the people in it.
Section 1. Psychological methods of forgetting
The methods described below help well both with a distant event that you want to forget, and with a very recent one. In the second Section there will be pharmacological methods of forgetting, but they will not work for old events, keep in mind!
- Working with the subconscious
We will make a separate episode about the subconscious. This is an important thing! We often do something unconsciously, wash the dishes, but plan something in our thoughts. Moreover, accumulated experience also results in behavior patterns. Have you noticed that you don’t know the person yet, but you don’t like him anymore and you won’t understand why. And it all started in kindergarten, when some boy stole your candy. And you, without realizing it, noticed similar features. Or you just start talking to a person and realize that you can count on him or her, even though you’ve known each other for less than a minute. Well, you won’t remember the old film and the good character in it.
And the trick of the subconscious is variability! Have you noticed how tastes and preferences change over time?
The method of working with the subconscious involves self-hypnosis or programming itself. Shifting the vector from sharply negative to neutral or even positive!
You need to abstract yourself from the situation and think, were there other people with similar negative memories? Or maybe even this negativity was good for me? And I coped with the situation, which means I became even stronger and now very little can bring me down.
- Get distracted
It also happens that a person becomes fixated and makes a mountain out of a mountain. Then, at the first memory, we immediately sharply switch our attention! Plus, a person is independently capable of repressing any memories.
Description of aircraft
The word comes from “let”, meaning the river of oblivion. The technique is used to suppress annoying thoughts or get rid of information that has lost its relevance.
There are two ways:
- Suppression. The more a person tries not to remember, the more annoying the phenomena become. Describe them on a piece of paper, based on all the details. Try to throw out the negativity on paper, visualizing what happened. Then burn the note and watch the fire. At the same time, try to realize that the moments of the past turn into ashes and crumble.
- Delete. Unnecessary data can be eradicated by the “flight rag” exercise. If information is represented in your head by images, mentally pick up the cloth and erase them. Think about how they disappear and are no longer there.
