If science perfects a shot that increases your brain plasticity, returning your brain to a youthful learning state, at the cost of old knowledge, would you take it when you get old?
More specifically, you'd lose knowledge you didn't spend time practicing soon after the shot, but you'd also be able to gain new skills with ease, including skills that are extremely hard to learn as an adult (fluent languages, musical abilities, visual processing for people blind in their childhood, etc.).
Note: This isn't just some crazy sci-fi idea I cooked up. It'll probably be a real thing in a few decades (how long depends on how hard the unwanted side effects are to fix):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YATDKQHUEs
Remember, in the poll it's a perfected version of this technology I'm asking about. There's no side effects.
That said, I am extrapolating that you'd lose old knowledge. It's possible that the real world version could be a best of both worlds.
However, I think it's very likely you'd lose old knowledge because you're shifting around the connections in your brain, which will probably entail the loss of less used connections that were only preserved before the plasticity-increasing treatment because they were set down early in life very strongly.
It's also very possible that in the real world it would impact people's memories (and trauma), since memories are also encoded in the brain.
Memories that weren't thought about during the new critical period could be easily forgotten as they are instead replaced with new memories and knowledge.
That said, it should be a simple matter of creating a memory scrapbook that you review periodically to keep memories dear to you alive. You already rewrite your memories whenever you think about them.
As far as the poll is concerned, I'm assuming that memory loss is not a side effect. Either it just doesn't happen or there's some simple mitigation strategy wrapped into the treatment.
As for trauma, it's harder to tell what impact this would have on it since trauma may be more than just bad memories.
That said, if we assume traumatic memories are the key component and working through trauma is basically using your plasticity to create new, healthier pathways, then this would be extremely helpful.
A trauma patient either go through therapy during the new critical period and have it be extremely effective, or they could avoid thinking about the trauma entirely until it's gone
@urusan
To my understanding, traumatic memories are also established more firmly than learned knowledge and skills, since the brain sees those as warnings about a survival threat. So those would be among the least affected.
My mental model of "working through trauma" is that it happens when the person is able to integrate the traumatic experience into their mental schema without distorting the schema in a maladaptive way. So if you mean new, healthier pathways that make this integration happens, I agree, and I hope that's the way it goes. But if you meant the newer pathways replace those related to the traumatic memory, that sounds both unlikely and something different from working through the trauma.
