Anxiety disorders like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are a difficulty all-too-real in our country; the number of annual cases of PTSD among soldiers, for example, has risen sharply since September 11, since soldiers started serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation New Dawn. These disorders create huge, sometimes unscalable hurdles for suffering individuals. Now more than ever our country, especially our soldiers, could benefit from the ability to rewrite the painful memories causing their disorders. Neuroscientist Daniela Schiller is working to make this a reality, writes the MIT Technology Review.
Historically, memories have been depicted as files our brains store away in our minds. When something in our environment triggers us to retrieve that memory from our mental storerooms, we experience the memory just as it was recorded and then file it away once again. When we refile the memories we do not alter them in any way. Over the past few decades, however, this belief has been overturned to reveal more accurate information on how our brains store memories, and researchers have realized we actually alter a memory each time we recall it.
Through testing on animals and humans researchers have discovered that memories are not unchangeable but rather rewritable “files” that are modified each time we remember them and then store them away again. With this knowledge Schiller, the daughter of a Holocaust victim, aims to find a precise way to rewrite painful memories.
As a postdoc at NYU Schiller began fear experiments in humans. In the experiments, an electrode was strapped to a volunteer’s wrist in order to deliver a mild but irritating electric shock. Sensors were attached to several of the volunteer’s fingers of the other hand in order to measure the his/her psychological arousal and fear in response to elements of the experiment. The volunteers were then made to stare at a computer screen, where they were shown a blue square. The researchers followed the blue square by an electric shock and repeated the process until the volunteer associated the blue square with the impending shock and created a memory of the fear.
The following day Schiller repeated the experiment with the same volunteers, only this time she showed the blue square without sending the shock. Though at first the blue square caused the volunteers fear due to their memory of it as the element that triggered the shock, they quickly stopped associating the blue square with the shock and incorporated the new memory into their internal filing cabinets, so to speak.
Schiller and her researchers began playing with timing. They discovered that if, within 10 minutes of creating the blue square-shock association in the volunteers, the blue square was shown without following it by a shock, the volunteers were immediately able to reconsolidate the memory without fear. If the researchers waited six hours, however, to show the blue square without the shock, the volunteers still experienced fear. In this way, Schiller and her researchers discovered that they could rewrite a memory before it was stored by intervening soon after the memory was created.
In the future, Schiller aims to use this method on a larger scale to combat not just fear of small electric shocks but larger, the debilitating memories some humans house in their minds. Through continued research Schiller hopes to develop a therapeutical way for humans to re-associate the painful emotions they associate with the content of certain memories. “When you affect emotional memory, you don’t affect the content,” she said. “You still remember perfectly. You just don’t have the emotional memory.”
Schiller is not the only researcher working toward this goal. For example Yan-Xue Xue of Peking University in Beijing and colleagues reported last year that they had helped heroin addicts rewrite their association of environmental triggers with a craving for the drug. The researchers reported that the effect lasted at least half a year, the length of the study.
What will happen if, in the future, we are able to rewrite our memories? I wonder if we could end up living in a world like that portrayed in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I just hope we don’t use the technology to erase memories of ended relationships but rather to overcome anxiety disorders and help our soldiers, among others, live their lives PTSD-free.
How do you imagine a world where we can rewrite memories? Let us know in the comments
Image 1 by Id-iom; Image 2 by Eric, Illuminaut
I don’t think I would do this. I feel like those memories are something to learn from, and gain wisdom for the future.
I agree with you Karl
I agree as well Karl Monson.. I believe that past memories are a good reference experience to maybe help/inspire others.
I think Anthony Robbins talks about ths – but I agree with Karl.
Removing a memory entirely is one thing, but perhaps if we could change the way to memory effects us, that would be the best. In effect if we could modify the memories so that we have moved on from them. I still see value in remember where we’ve been and what we’ve done.
If bad memories could be erased, most psychiatrists would be out of business. I know I have some memories that I’d like to erase.
I like Dan Tulloh’s idea – change the way we reacted to it, altering the negative association that we probably made based on some erroneous data.
I don’t know, I almost think we’d be more machine than human if we could modify ourselves THAT easily, but, I certainly think its cool what they’re doing, and it could certainly help certain people.
I lost 2 children to MD, had to deal with Post Traumatic Disorder for years. Yes, memories are Life, but this is amazing. I believe, it will help so many! Great post!
It still wouldn’t change the past
Nobody can change the past. BUT, the Future can be better 🙂
<3
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I have no idea Terri Nakamura,,, let me check <3
Heather Jabusch <3
Dana Nusbaum <3
Is that what the movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was about?
That would be *****magic*****…
Yes I believe we can alter our emotion that attach to certain event of our past. In fact there is already available techniques on how to do it.
You can easily extend this to the obvious military application is to have soldiers who think like men but suffer no remorse for any horrific damage they do to other humans. PTSS is also tied in with guilt. Whether deserved, or not, I don’t envy a development where no fear, no guilt, no consequence is experienced by our fighting men and women.
Who is paying for this research? that’s my question.
Besides, I’d think the daughter of a holocaust victim would embrace the concept of “Never forget”.
I would hope that that would never happen. I think we can look to the past to how that would work in a military application and dangers it brings. War with out fear, guilt, and no consequence is a set up to failure in the human race.