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Talk:Mindwipe

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Babylon 5

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There was an episode of Babylon 5 that dealt with mindwipes, I don't recall what it was titled. Dread Lord CyberSkull ✎☠ 13:23, 29 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Complaint about lack of references

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Mindwiping =/= altering memories; maybe this article should be renamed?

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Wiping generally refers to "erasing" as in "wiping a hard disk" (formatting/emptying it). Hence a "mindwipe" doesn't refer to alterations of memory.

I removed the "or altered" part in the lede.

As there's no other dedicated page to memory in fiction one option would be to renamed this article into something like "Memory in fiction" or "Memory erasure and alteration in fiction" or "Memory erasure and manipulation in fiction" with "Mindwiping" just becoming a subsection of that article. "Mindwiping" as a term afaik isn't that much used in science fiction anyway and there are many science fiction stories which feature memory alterations or alike but not memory erasure...actually even some entries in here, such as The Children of Húrin (if I recall correctly; read the short version in The Silmarillion a while ago) aren't about mindwiping but unspecified memory loss or memory alterations.

--Fixuture (talk) 21:26, 18 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I've commented out the Tolkien and Total Recall examples for now until it is decided how much this will cover. There's already a Mind control in popular culture which includes all the brainwashing techniques. If this is to be a subset of that to be focused on memories, that would be fine. The Memory in fiction category would have more of the psychological aspects than just mind control such as amnesia, short-term memory loss, photographic memory, Rashomon effect (different accounts of the same event). AngusWOOF (barksniff) 22:45, 18 August 2015 (UTC) updated 23:11, 18 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It should not include the hypnosis cases where the subject is mind controlled or possessed briefly or has temporary amnesia but when they return to normal, they naturally "forget" the recent events; that happens way too often in all sorts of stories. It has to be quite deliberate and last a bit as with the neuralyzer. There is the other direction too, uploading new information to the brain as with The Matrix "I know kung fu" and Johnny Mnemonic. AngusWOOF (barksniff) 23:11, 18 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]