Forgetting pill

There are movies, plays and works of art that I wish I had never seen, books that I wish I had never read, places that I wish I had never visited, and music that I wish I had never heard, so that I could experience them again for the first time. For all of these things, I will never again have that initial heady experience of discovery and wonder.

If only there were a forgetting pill that could make you selectively forget a particular memory. We can erase files on our computers with ease. Yet we are unable to do the same with our own memories.

I wonder how the world would change if somebody were to invent a forgetting pill. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to simply release it out into the world. The inventors would likely want to do experiments to determine whether the net effect of selective forgetting was positive or negative.

Then again, maybe this has already happened. Perhaps in a research lab somewhere, an intrepid team has solved this very problem, and produced the perfect forgetting pill.

They may even have done controlled tests to see how such a thing would affect peoples’ lives. And maybe they didn’t like what they found.

So the entire team just did the safe and responsible thing. They took the pill and forgot all about it.