Ethical reflections on the selective reconfiguration of emotional memory: impact on personal identity
Creators: name: Larrivee, Denis
name: Echarte, Luis
Publisher: name: F1000Research
Year: 2015

description: This paper explores the ethical consequences of selectively reconfiguring one’s memories and conjoined emotions, from a perspective of the impact on personal identity. In philosophical theories of personal identity, identity is construed as a particular relation that accounts for a person X to be identical to a later person Y by virtue of the designated relationship between the two. Most philosophers adopt a relationship that is described by the psychological continuity theory originally proposed by John Locke, or a related modification: “...a thinking, intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places”. The form of psychological continuity proposed thus entails an awareness of the self and one’s self engagement that is recollected across temporally and spatially distinct settings. Increasingly, neuroscientific work now shows that such recollection is intimately associated with specialized neural circuits that retain information of past events. These studies indicate that memory is comprised of a complex molecular, anatomical, and physiological substratum that is sited to synaptic loci and is formed in multiple phases. Memories of distinct information content, e.g., those encoding factual information vs those encoding emotion, are recorded through independent avenues prior to reconstitution as holistic experiences (Teyler and DiScenna, 1986). Recent experiments in animals to reconfigure memories indicate that not only the event-specific sensory representations, but also the binding features to interoceptive emotional processing are labile (Redondo et al., 2014), a feature very likely shared with humans. These findings thus suggest that narrative events of recollection that construct the perception of identity are themselves susceptible to manipulation. Memory traces, in fact, can be modified at several stages, either by altering the representation of the event, its emotional processing, or the linkage between the two. Self contextualization mechanisms may then bind the perception of self to any one of several permutations of these events. Accordingly, one’s sense of personal identity may become susceptible to manipulation, either by modifying event specific data associated with affect responses or by linkage of inappropriate affect responses with personal memories. Moreover, since affect circuits are intrinsically goal directed such changes may lead to an ambivalent association of self with particular goals. Taken together these experiments also suggest that phenomenological criteria for personal identity that are conditioned on biophysical parameters alone are themselves plastic and may afford insufficient grounding for its philosophical conception. They raise numerous questions of both an ethical and philosophical nature with regard to the structuring of personal identity.<br><br> Teyler TJ and DiScenna P. 1986. The hippocampal memory indexing theory. Behav Neurosci<br>100:147-154.<br><br>Redondo RL, Kim J, Arons AL, Ramirez S, Liu X, Tonegawa S. 2014. Bidirectional switch of the valence associated<br>with a hippocampal contextual memory engram. Nature 513:426-430.