It reminds me of that old joke of the 2 scientists studying a fly.
Scientist 1: Fly, fly!
Scientist 2: When fly has two wings fly flies 2 feet.
Scientist 1: pulls off one wing and says Fly, Fly!
Scientist 2: When fly has 1 wing, fly flies 1 foot
Scientist 1: pulls off the other wing and says, Fly, fly!.
Nothing happens
Scientist 1 Fly, Fly!
Nothing happens
Scientist 1 showing frustration> FLY! FLY!
Scientist 2: When fly has no wings, fly becomes deaf.
Sidenote: It's weird to me that more people don't talk about the inevitability of that one with the soldiers with cybernetic HUD implants that, shocking twist later, can make civilians look like monsters to be purged.
On the other hand, why bother when the Boston Dynamics murderbots are probably cheaper?
I agree. But I also wouldn't mind forgetting one or two things. However, I've also watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, so I know it ends with me having perpetual dementia-like fever dreams.
As I suspected it appears they tortured the snails somehow (my guess is electric shock) to create traumatic memories. This has been done with caterpillars I think to see if they retain memories after turning into butterflies and they do, despite basically turning into primordial goop in the cocoon. They do, and it's tested by seeing if they retain aversions to certain areas of their cages that are electrified.
Then something about enzymes created which associate memory with pain and being able to target them.
Pretty cool, and I for one definitely have a few traumas I'd like erased.
There is debate about how the therapy works and whether it is more effective than other established treatments.[1][5] The eye movements have been criticized as having no scientific basis.[6] The founder promoted the therapy for the treatment of PTSD, and proponents employed untestable hypotheses to explain negative results in controlled studies.[7] EMDR has been characterized as a pseudoscientific purple hat therapy (i.e., only as effective as its underlying therapeutic methods without any contribution from its distinctive add-ons).[8]
I read about that fifteen years ago and dismissed it as pseudoscience. Wikipedia confirms. Pass (thanks though, don't mean to be rude)
Probably something like the snail learned to find food in a certain place, then they were able to make it forget such that it would search randomly instead of going to the place it had learned.
I read a study once about caterpillars getting shocked in their cages to teach them which areas are electrified. They retained this memory aversion after turning into butterflies. Probably something similar, basic behavioral observations to stimuli.
There was a period during the Chinese Communist revolution that basically labeled a lot of modern science as capitalist propaganda.
There's a book series that starts with that event, and is the inciting event that caused a group of scientists to basically invite a hostile race of aliens to earth to wipe out and rebuild society.
Call me Hitler but it's only a snail. If this can erase my dad strangling me or watching someone shoot themself from my brain IDC how many invertebrates die for it.