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Achieving total happiness pervades our popular culture. Just one glance at social media shows the reality that our lives are centered around figuring out how to experience joy. Unfortunately, often it seems like happiness is a state of mind that’s almost unachievable. According to the CDC’s 2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, almost 15.5 million Americans take antidepressants, a number that has tripled since 2000. And, as we struggle to get through each day in the middle of a pandemic, the search for happiness seems more elusive and yet more essential than ever. The good news is there are many areas of science trying to help. And the field of neuroscience, in particular, has turned to understanding how our memories might play into our mood. Which means in the future, if something in our lives makes us unhappy, we may be able to use new technologies to simply erase it from our minds.
Advances are coming that will allow humans to remove, manipulate, or implant new memories, which could theoretically one day help us to get rid of negative feelings or thoughts that prevent us from being happy. It sounds like far-out science fiction but Steve Ramirez, a neuroscientist who runs The Ramirez Group at the Center for Memory and Brain at Boston University, says scientific marvels for obtaining future happiness can be achieved thanks to the increasing power of brain-imaging technology. By watching the brain physically form the memories that we might one day like to forget, Ramirez and other scientists have learned that they are made from “enduring changes that happen at all levels in the brain—from genes to single brain cells communicating to form circuits and systems,” he says.
In other words, when you experience a new event, your brain physically changes. It forms connections that represent the positive or negative memory. And every time you recall it, the brain goes through the process of re-forming those specific connections. According to Ramirez, the memory “becomes subject to modification—not huge changes, but those details can matter. When you have a memory, it’s changed just in the process of recalling it. You can’t step in the same river twice.” (If we recalled memories in the exact same way that we initially experienced them, he says, it would feel like a hallucination.)
So what does all this mean for our future happiness? This dynamic nature of memory formation means that scientists can track a memory that causes unhappiness as it is being formed. They can watch “a constellation of activity” happen throughout the brain “where millions of brain cells start coordinating with each other almost like a symphony,” Ramirez says. “Multiple corners of the brain start communicating and it becomes more and more efficient as they start wiring together and connecting to enable the formation and storage of the memory.” And since scientists can physically see it happen, that means they can then go into the brain and change the connections that make the memory. So if a person wants to change their recall of an unhappy, negative experience, neuroscientists could either adjust the connections to alter it, delete the connections to remove it entirely, or add connections to make a whole new happy memory.
Ramirez imagines that one day targeted drugs could be developed to work in concert with brain imaging to alter negative memories and make people happier. In fact, he says, there’s already work being done with PTSD patients in which they are given small doses of MDMA and asked to recall traumatic memories. The euphoria of the drug ultimately dampens the emotional relationship to the events. In addition, researchers sponsored by the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are looking at ways to connect the brain to computers through noninvasive, mind-machine interfaces that can target neurons and enhance or alter a person’s mood.
Looking even further into the future, there’s an opportunity for this technology to help researchers discover and map the areas of the brain responsible for mental health conditions, such as anxiety or depression. Rameriz says one day, we may find biomarkers for a brain pattern that indicates that a person is likely to develop one of these illnesses. Meaning humans might not even have to search for happiness at all. They would simply just walk into a doctor’s office and, like having a blood test or a genetic test, get their brain imaged and find out they’re predisposed to stress, depression, anxiety, or any number of psychological disorders that would make them unhappy. Doctors could then treat those conditions before they ever even appear.
When the tech to map our brains and alter or erase our negative memories is eventually combined with an ability to prevent disorders that predispose us to unhappiness, it’s worth asking: What kind of humans will we be? It’s possible people in the future may or may not want to use these tools so broadly. “We can kill the memory of [a negative] event but it’s more therapeutically appealing to target the emotions that imbue a memory,” Ramirez says. After all, he continues, “the memory helps us be who we are.” Will people in the future actually want to achieve happiness by completely eliminating some of their life experiences? Who wouldn’t want to chase a golden ticket to humanity’s Holy Grail? Perhaps future humans will decide achieving total happiness is worth remaking themselves into someone entirely new.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Peacock's Brave New World.
