For you're purposes, I am guessing a type of hypnosis (if the person is succeptible) or even brainwashing, a la Clockwork Orange, were you associate a horrible pain or sickness with the memory, would keep most people from accessing it.

I think it was some sort of electro shock to specific parts of his brain. He was still fully functional but had lost his past????

I looked a little like the places where they used to -- two hunded years ago? -- used to hit the head to turn people into idiots????

If you are talking about "re-education" or "brainwashing" then memory loss is less of an issue than perception modification.

The techniques for brainwashing are generally a combination of diet manipulation coupled with drug therapy, usually a hallucinagenic like LSD.

Real Human Cyborg

Short term memory would be easy to wipe out, think of it as RAM, simply short circuiting the process and keeping it from being written to long term memory.

Long term is more like ROM and you'd need to actually corrupt or destroy the storage unit to get rid of the data, which makes recalling it later much more different.

A possible out would be they have a procedure that wipes short term memory, but the individual has already processed it to long term momory. Because he has lost his short term memory he might very likely lose the ability to recall the pertinent information because he no longer has the memories to put it in context. Think of mislabelling a file, later as he rebuilds the context of why the info is pertinent he is able to once again access the info that has been stored long term.

hmm well, let me create an example of the kind of thing I'm aiming at.

[for the record this is not my story]
Imagine a guy, Jim, he's a secret agent for the US, and Russia capture him, they chemically induce him with something that will keep him intact and functioning, except corrupt his long term memory (theoretically), but it doesn't work (maybe he unknowingly resists it somehow) So, when he "Wakes up" he doesn't remember much, except for some short term memory, and gradually things start coming back to him in bits and pieces, until that big moment when AH-hA! it all fits together.

I was reading a magazine (Discover most likely) and it mentioned that important people and events have a single cell devoted to remembering them. I thought that it was interesting, so I logged it away.

Now, if they could go in and "delete" these cells, it should be like removing something off a drive; the computer (or brain) still functions, but the data just isn't there. Now if they didn't delete it but put it in a different directory, or tried to overwrite it, or bypass it...they could pick the stuff they want him to remember, make him forget what they don't, and maybe even transplant new cells in...

I would have been able to remember my grandma if it weren't for the near-lethal dose of Zerotrope I was given before being inducted into the SSI.

Xanalax (lax usually = laxative, so you could do this for, literally, sh!ts and giggles.)

Memoxone
Memoroxy (roxy for short - like how most street drugs get short names)
Mathalane
Mixtrictane
Xipiran

Yes, I could do this all day (DH used to work in the pharma industry...)

Zenalt
Lithaxilt
Azikza (azzy)
Artorz

Play with some word that means memory, dig up latin roots, etc (many drug names are based on latin roots and their meaning, followed by countless focus groups and market research to make sure there aren't any unanticipated consequences of name, followed by thorough internet search for existence of name and domain ownership...you get the idea.)

The movie 'Paycheck' had an ingenious solution to this. There were two drugs. The first was a kind of 'marker', and the second erased all long term memories acquired since the marker injection. Some kind of nanotechnology, as was suggested earlier, performing the marker function might also be believeable.

quote:

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...a memory that involves several different aspects of the brain - taste, sight, sound, smell, would all have bits of the memory stored in different places.

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Zero - you want the wipe to fail and the memories to start coming back.

Since pieces of an individual memory can be all over the place, the wipers could take care of the brain's "index" and also get portions of the memory, but miss a component. The memory is still there, but he has to find a different trigger; he smells a household cleaner and a memory starts coming back along secondary links, gradually reconstructing itself along different pathways than usual, sort of like what happens when someone suffers brain damage and has to learn to do everyday things over again, redirecting pathways.

Jim Carey's character decided to fight the memory wipe and "hid" the memory. Because he was able to save part of the memory, he could reconstruct it and help the girl do the same.