Memory inheritor

Chapter 86 Settling

Wei Hongsi knew that his suggestion to the task force to "not investigate for now" would put Director Liang and Director Shi in a very difficult position, but they would probably still adopt it in the end.

Traditional investigative approaches and methods are rarely effective against tightly structured, extreme criminal organizations like DL.

Mu Jie in this case is a prime example. If it weren't for a bug that led to a clue from his dream, the investigation would have stalled there. The task force has recently studied many cases committed by the DL organization in other countries and should have a deep understanding of this point.

Although his suggestion was quite unconventional, it effectively addressed the task force's pain points and was not difficult to implement.

The risks involved are certainly significant, but compared to the dangers posed by the DL organization, taking the risk is still worthwhile.

Wei Hongsi made this suggestion precisely because of these considerations. If Director Liang and his team take this into account, they will most likely make the same choice.

The case has reached this stage, and the task force has already invested a great deal of effort and energy. They clearly had clues that could have led to further investigation, but they missed the opportunity due to the constraints of the rules. I doubt anyone would be willing to accept that.

The difference is that the person who came up with the idea doesn't have to take responsibility, while the task force has to bear enormous pressure. Whether one person takes responsibility or several people share the responsibility makes no difference in the outcome.

On Monday morning, Wei Hongsi had just sat down in his office when his phone vibrated. He glanced at the caller ID—it was Feng Weixu—and picked it up.

"Good morning!" Feng Weixu's voice carried a lazy tone, as if he were making the call while lying in bed. "Director Shi just called me, and our decoding work is considered finished."

"Is there no follow-up?"

"Dai Mengqi and I will go and hand over the work to them later. They can handle the rest of the work themselves."

"Then I won't be going there for the next few days."

"The boss will be back this weekend, so we'll have a get-together then."

"Okay, got it."

Wei Hongsi hung up the phone and stared at his phone for a while, lost in thought.

He felt that the task force's arrangement was a prelude to taking action, considering that the subsequent interpretation would touch the core of the DL organization, so they replaced it with their own people.

He put his phone on the table, opened the official website of Yuecheng University on his computer, and looked up Professor William Finch's personal homepage, which showed that he would be hosting two academic seminars this Wednesday and Friday.

Yuecheng University is a long-established comprehensive university with three campuses in the city. Wei Hongsi mainly studied at the old campus and rarely went to the East Campus where the School of Foreign Languages ​​was located. He also never paid attention to the teaching and academic activities of the School of Foreign Languages.

Therefore, he had never met Professor William Finch, and before seeing the basic information presented by the task force, he did not even know that there was such a professor at his school.

The subsequent investigation is now the police's responsibility; he probably won't have the opportunity to participate, nor should he inquire about the progress. Perhaps some clues can be gleaned from Professor William Finch's homepage.

He bookmarked Professor William Finch's homepage, then closed the page, adjusted his mindset, and focused on his work.

The CDU project team's work is now nearing completion.

The participants who experienced psychological distress due to watching Plan B have all received effective treatment, but continued follow-up observation is still necessary. Completely eliminating the impact of negative emotions requires a relatively long process; a week is certainly not enough.

Wei Hongsi suggested to Ji Cheng that the seven subjects with more severe mental pollution should ideally come for a follow-up examination once a week. The others could have a follow-up examination after half a month.

Through this practice, both the "neutralization method" and the "cognitive restructuring method" have been validated and further optimized and improved during the treatment process.

However, while these two methods are effective, it is difficult to achieve a complete cure. They can only rely on the brain's own mechanisms to forget, which is a rather long process.

Therefore, after careful consideration, Wei Hongsi proposed a new method, which he called the "emotional reshaping method".

Before the CDU project team was established, he, Gu Shiming, Qian Jiayu, and Yu Sheng discussed three solutions to address negative emotional pollution. In addition to the "neutralization method" and the "cognitive reconstruction method," there was also a "memory erasure method," but it was rejected because it involved ethical review issues and required a lot of resources.

The "memory erasure" they are discussing is not about directly erasing a memory; such a technology, which carries enormous ethical risks, is not even on their radar.

Human memory is not static. A memory that exists in the brain is reactivated every time it is recalled, entering an unstable state, and then needs to be stored again. This is the brain's memory consolidation process.

The core principle of "memory erasure" is to weaken or change the memory by intervening in the window of time for reconsolidation.

This technology was first used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It activates the consolidation window of traumatic memories through drugs or neurostimulation techniques and intervenes in them, thereby weakening or erasing the related memories.

However, the human memory neural network is intertwined, like many intersecting lines drawn with a pencil. Memory erasure technology is like a large eraser. While erasing the target line, it often inevitably erases other non-target lines, causing non-target memories to be weakened or erased as well.

Furthermore, this technology can lead to cognitive biases in recipients, raising ethical risks.

For example, soldiers who undergo the erasure of war trauma memories may have originally felt disgust and fear towards war. However, due to the disappearance of the memories that triggered these emotions, their attitude towards war and life may become indifferent and apathetic. This raises serious ethical issues related to altering the foundation of one's personality.

Wei Hongsi's "emotional reshaping method" is based on the same principle as the "memory deletion method," but instead of intervening in the memory itself during the memory consolidation window, it intervenes in the negative emotions within that memory. This is the fundamental difference between the two.

Negative emotions fall into the realm of the subconscious. In a waking state, they are suppressed by the brain's "conscious censorship mechanism" and are difficult to express directly. However, in dreams, this suppression becomes much weaker, and the subconscious becomes very active.

The concept of "emotional reshaping" is to first induce stimulation in the subject to trigger dreams of related memories, and then, based on the content of the dream narrative, to precisely intervene in those amplified negative emotions.