September 21, 2012

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports Your Universe Online

Emotional memories can be erased shortly after they are formed through behavioral intervention alone, without the aid of medications, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal Science.

The breakthrough offers a major step forward in understanding where fearful memories are processed in the brain, and how to permanently erase them. The research could be particularly helpful for people suffering from conditions such as anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, the researchers said.

When a person learns something, a lasting long-term memory is created through a process of consolidation, which is based on the formation of proteins. When we remember something, the memory becomes unstable for a short time, and is then restabilized by another consolidation process. In other words, we are not remembering what originally happened, but rather what we remembered the last time we thought about what happened.

The studys researchers sought to examine whether disrupting the reconsolidation process that follows upon remembering something could affect the content of memory.

They showed a small group of study participants a neutral picture while simultaneously administering an electric shock so that the picture came to elicit fear, triggering the formation of a fear memory.

The same picture was then shown to the participants the following day, but without an accompanying shock, in order to activate this fear memory (the beginning of the reconsolidation process).

Although seeing the picture again reactivated the original fear memory, it also, theoretically, made the memory easier to erase.

The researchers then divided the subjects into two groups. The first subgroup was repeatedly shown the picture, without the shocks, in order to disrupt their reconsolidation process so they would stop associating one with the other.

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Fearful Memories Can Be Permanently Erased