A clue to the permanent erasure of a repetitively remembered bad or traumatic event comes from research in infant mice. In mice, the extinction therapy completely erases the fear memory, which cannot be retrieved.
Identifying the relevant brain changes in rodents between early infancy and the juvenile stage may help researchers recreate aspects of the child-like system and induce relapse-free erasure of negative memories in people.
One of the most promising techniques takes advantage of a brief period in which the adult brain resembles that of an infant, in that it is malleable. The process of jogging a memory, called "reconsolidation", seems to make it malleable for a few hours. During this time, the memory can be adapted and even potentially deleted.
Daniela Schiller at New York University and her colleagues tested this theory by presenting volunteers with a blue square at the same time as administering a small electric shock. When the volunteers were subsequently shown the blue square alone, the team measured tiny changes in sweat production, a well-documented fear response.
A day later, Schiller reminded some of the volunteers of the fear memory just once by presenting them with both square and shock, making the memory active. During this window of reconsolidation, the researchers tried to manipulate the memory by repeatedly exposing the volunteers to the blue square alone.
These volunteers produced the sweat response significantly less a day later compared with those who were given extinction therapy without any reconsolidation (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08637).
To read more of this article go to To erase a bad memory, first become a child - life - 09 December 2010 - New Scientist
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment