February 14, 2006 Source: McGill University:
http://www.mcgill.ca/newswire/?ItemID=18679 Traumatic memories can be separated from others Source: University Relations Office (URO) [newswire]
February 14, 2006 A McGill University researcher renowned for his work on the retrieval and neutralizing of traumatic memories has now concluded that the most harrowing images retained by the brain can be separated from more benign memories associated with an experience. McGill psychology professor Dr. Karim Nader and his colleagues at New York University and Université de Paris-Sud have discovered that treatment to lessen the intensity of painful memories often associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can zero in on the more anxiety-inducing images and lessen their intensity without disturbing indirect memories that provide context to the event in question. Their findings appear in this week’s journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "If you have a patient with PTSD and get them to think about the trauma, they will remember the trauma but they may also indirectly think about their mother or their friends. It would be a bad thing if our manipulations had affected both the directly remembered memories of trauma and all the other memories that are indirectly remembered." said Nader. The group’s experiments were conducted on rats that were conditioned to associate certain experiences with trauma – in this case a Pavlovian foot shock fear-conditioning system. The results suggest that memory reactivation produces content-limited rather than wholesale changes in a memory and its associations and explains why each time a memory is retrieved and updated, the entire associative context of the memory is not grossly altered. Nader’s previous work has looked at painful-memory retrieval and how drugs that inhibit the protein synthesis that builds fixed-memory neurons can then reduce the intensity of the trauma. That process was described in the journal Nature in 2000 and inspired the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Article: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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