LW - Some Experiments I'd Like Someone To Try With An Amnestic by johnswentworth

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Some Experiments I'd Like Someone To Try With An Amnestic, published by johnswentworth on May 5, 2024 on LessWrong. A couple years ago, I had a great conversation at a research retreat about the cool things we could do if only we had safe, reliable amnestic drugs - i.e. drugs which would allow us to act more-or-less normally for some time, but not remember it at all later on. And then nothing came of that conversation, because as far as any of us knew such drugs were science fiction. … so yesterday when I read Eric Neyman's fun post My hour of memoryless lucidity, I was pretty surprised to learn that what sounded like a pretty ideal amnestic drug was used in routine surgery. A little googling suggested that the drug was probably a benzodiazepine (think valium). Which means it's not only a great amnestic, it's also apparently one of the most heavily prescribed drug classes historically, and used recreationally - which puts very strong lower bounds on the drug's safety in practice, and means it's probably readily available. With that in mind, here are some experiments I'd love for someone to try (and report back on) using benzodiazepines. Tests IIUC, benzodiazepines (at the right doses) specifically block long-term memory formation: someone on the drug can keep things in working memory just fine, and can recall everything they already knew just fine, but basically won't remember new information past a few minutes. One very broad class of tests which such drugs open up is: put someone in a situation, see what they do for a minute or two, wait 5 minutes for them to forget, then repeat. Assuming their behavior is highly reproducible, that gives an ideal platform for testing interventions. I'm particularly interested in seeing this approach applied to IQ tests. The individual items on a typical IQ test fit comfortably in the few-minutes-long window allowed by the amnestic. So, basic test: give a few questions from a standard IQ test, repeat the questions five minutes later, and hopefully the person's responses are highly reproducible. Ideally, this would eliminate essentially all the usual test-retest variance seen on IQ tests, as well as the "learning the test" issues. Assuming that baseline works (i.e. results are very highly reproducible with little variance), the effects of interventions should be much easier to measure than they typically are in psych studies. Start with the basics: track room temperature and lighting, blood glucose and oxygenation, ventilation, background noise. As those change, measure the effects on performance on IQ test items. Run the test a few times on different days and in different places, and try to nail down the exact sources of all the variance seen day-to-day and place-to-place. Tracking down the causes of all that "everyday variance" is where most of the value would be. Once performance on different days is very precisely predictable, move to bigger interventions. Have the participant exercise in the middle of testing, or get a second participant and have them work together under the drug's effects, or tell the participant to "think step-by-step", or whatever other ideas you have. With the baseline sources of variance all nailed down, all this stuff should be much more precisely measurable than in the sort of studies typically done by research psychologists. Implementation Notes This is presumably the sort of thing which is tough to get past an institutional review board these days, but easy to do yourself over the weekend with a friend or two. So it's exactly the sort of scientific project perfectly suited to LessWrong. Unless you've used benzodiazepines before and know what dose you need, you should probably google around for dosing guidance. Note that this use-case is different from the standard recreational use-case; you might want d...