Drug which lets you forget everything
We all know how the story starts:
He woke up in strange room, not remembering who he was or how did he got to the room. But that was not his problem. Problem was the first writing he saw: "HELLO, I WANT TO PLAY A GAME"
The thing is, what kind of drug could Joe Average eat to let him forget almost everything?
And if you cannot be drugged to forget your own name, what drug would let you forget the past? (And as long to the past as possible).
Bonus points: What would be side effect of such drug?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/27996. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
Most amnesiac drugs only work while they are in your system, making it so that new memories can't be recorded, without messing with old stored memories. This is really useful for anesthetic, since if someone is having open heart surgery you really don't want them to remember anything afterward.
One of these drugs that has been misused is Rohypnol.
There are a few drugs that are in the highly experimental stage, meaning they have never been tested on humans, which can wipe out past memories.
(Un)fortunately, since they've never been used on people, we don't really know what the effects would be.
a zeta inhibitory peptide (ZIP) is a drug that inhibits the protein called PKC zeta, which is needed to maintain long term memories. There is a lot still left to learn about this area, but it looks like it would erase past memories, while allowing the subject to learn new things. How much stuff gets erased is unknown. So it could work for your story, or the guy could end up as a mental infant again, but it'll probably be many years before we know which outcome is most likely.
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