SO, in reading more and more about enhancement it seems that people are always on the line about what they want done. take memory enhancement for example, on one side, course you want to remember people's names, important dates, and facts for tests better! that seems like a given, please can you condense coffee into a pill and serve it on a tray ushered by midgets, please? Oh, wait, they already did that minus the midget with a tray thing-Adderol?? Ritolin?? But, I suppose that is not what they are talking about memory enhancement. No, what they are talking about is, acetylcholinesterase inhibitors! Yay, a drug that really does improve the memory overtime, while also serving as a treatment for Alzheimer's Disease. SO, what's the problem? Ah, the other side of the fence, why we wouldn't want to improve our memories: because is it not possible that the mind forgets certain things on purpose? Certain traumatizing things, certain embarrassing things? But the question remains, on what grounds should we be enhancing a "normal" persons memory, when as far as the rest of the world is concerned they are perfectly normal, and normal implies forgetting things, it is part of life. I think that when answering this question it comes down to how would each person's life be changed if they had an enhanced memory? And the sad and honest truth to that is that most people's lives would be in utter chaos because most people can't handle the things that their brains are purposefully forgetting, they are the things that we talk about hypothetically, like they happen to people, but never to us. How many times have I woken up with a seriously bad head ache, no memory of anything that happened the night before, and some random cut or bruise that I have no idea how it got there? A few times, I'll admit to that. But what if I could remember what all those cuts and bruises were from and heaven forbid what if they were from some terrible thing that happened to me? In that case is it good that I blacked out and don't remember?

So that is one of the worst examples that I can think of for myself, but in a more serious, realistic example, rape victims seldom remember what happened to them the night that they were raped, sometimes even something happens called Retrograde Amnesia, where they can't remember up to a year or months before the trauma. In these cases should these people be given a drug to make them remember or does that seem like cruel and unusual punishment?

when I try and consider an answer to this dilemma the best that I can do without becoming to attached is to say that overall i think that yes people should use whatever kind of memory enhancement that they can get, even if it brings up those demons in your soul, because one thing that people can not deny is that they learn from their mistakes, and if you just forget your mistakes then you will never learn from them. (Oh and when i say you, i am referring to all of people as a whole, not as individuals independently, because i think that in order for society to improve upon the things that we just keep making mistakes over, we need to learn from them and try and change them.