According to the Telegraph scientists have worked out how to delete your unwanted memories while leaving others intact.

Shockingly it turns out that the Telegraph is exaggerating slightly (just like the Guardian last week), but it’s a really interesting area.

What the research in question actually shows is that giving propranolol – a betablocker aka Inderal – to people who have recently suffered or ‘reactivated the memory of’ a traumatic event reduces their physiologic response the next time they remember the event in question, implying that it has become less of a painful experience.

Preliminary work in humans and rats has been happening for years but I think this is the first trial with actual trauma sufferers (this isn’t my area of expertise, feel free to correct in the comments).

The idea of dampening or removing painful memories raises many interesting questions, some of which were tackled by The President’s Council on Bioethics in a meeting in 2003. They’re quite critical of memory altering drugs, mostly because of the huge potential for misuse.

All of us can think of traumatic events in our lives that were horrible at the time but made us who we are. I’m not sure we’d want to wipe those memories out. Rebecca Dresser, PCoB

Perhaps easier to agree with when you haven’t been a victim of horrific assault or abuse, but Dresser’s point is worth thinking about. Are your raw, emotional memories – however traumatic – valuable because they make you who you are now?

In a way we’ve already made this decision as a society. Inderal is already taken (sometimes prescribed, sometimes not) for stage fright and social anxiety . Does being frightened of performing a clarient solo or attending a job interview make you ‘who you are’? Do you just need to pull your socks up, hit all the bum notes and accept that it in the long run it’ll make you a better person? Apparently it doesn’t, necessarily, and you don’t. How then can we begrudge accident victims or veterans use of the same drug?