I Think ARICEPT® Should Be Used as a Crime-Fighting Tool.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I assume MPSIMS is the place for expressing general opinions. If I am wrong, someone please correct me.

I think ARICEPT® should be used as a crime-fighting tool. Aricept is used for Alzheimer’s disease. But as I understand it, its effect goes much further than just that. Aricept literally improves your memory and recall. So thus it would be an excellent way, I think, to help crime victims and witnesses recall exactly what they saw. And unlike hypnosis, the recall improvement that they would experience would be totally objective as opposed to the sometimes subjective effects hypnosis has.

If you take the time to read my post, please feel free to give me your opinions. I also would value the input from law enforcement and medical people. I am very serious when I offer this as input. I think the sometimes subjective and unreliable evidence things like hypnosis and lie detectors provide is a hinderance to crime prevention (and Aricept-derived evidence would probably be admissible in court too, I’m sure).

(And if you are a moderator and I have put this in the wrong section of the boards, please tell me the correct place for future reference.)

:slight_smile:

2

Well, just going by what very little I know about such things, and the pretty pictures on that site, it doesn’t really look like the stuff can be said definitively to do much one way or the other. Some slight effect, sure, but how much is that, really?

Not enough to base our system of justice on a pill, that’s for sure.

Then again, if anyone DID invent a ‘perfect recall pill’, maybe we should consider it. It’s a good idea.

3

That’s kind of what I thought. I don’t know how much boost ARICEPT® would give.

The whole idea, tho, smacks of truth serums and CIA hijincks and James Bond… kinda creepy.

4

Jim,

You make the assumption that people (witnesses) accurately store as memories exactly what their senses recorded at the time. You then assume that the problem with imperfect recall later is with reading out what was stored.

IIRC, most research on brain function indicates that’s not the problem with witness recall.

What people initially store as “memories” is a heavily edited impression of their sensory input. Sort of an Impressionist sketch of what they saw, heard, felt, etc. And their emotional state at the time of storage VERY heavily influences what the sketch looks like.

When we recall something, we retrieve that sketch. Since ALL our memories are sketches, we’re used to the world looking that way in retrospect and we gloss over the difference between the sketch and what seems to us to be an accurate fully detailed “movie” of the event.

For an Alzheimer’s patient, simply being able to recall the sketch, faulty as it is compared to true reality, would in fact be a clinical improvement. Their memory would be restored.

For a witness, who can accurately recall the sketch now, the pill will do nothing to improve the fidelity of the sketch to the original events. That’s the problem.

The main reason hypnonsis doesn’t provide high fidelity recall, as you rightly point out, is that it encourages folks to unwittingly add new features to the sketch.

Then when they later recall the adulterated sketch, it’s almost impossible for them, or an observer, to tell which features where from the original memory impression and which were added later under hypnonsis.

That’s why, after hypnonsis, people can truly believe they recall things that never happened. They are accurately recovering the current version of the sketch, but that sketch has been permanently altered and there’s no way to recover the original, the true memory.

All in all, I doubt the pill is going to help crime fighting much.

5

I predict a big black market among high school and college students.