This article is looking at the potential for a drug to affect traumatic memories. As I said, it is mildly interesting- for one thing, while they are looking for drug to suppress traumatic memories, at the same time they have identified an easier and less risky method of releasing the trigger for the emotional memory.
If you open up the memory, let the emotion be expressed, and repeat it a few times, the trigger dissolves. Once the emotion is released and the triggers are dissolved, the memory is not harmful and doesn’t cause a reaction.
Hypnotherapist do this all the time. Releasing negative memories is not difficult challenge. But the drug companies hope to make it much more complex. And much more profitable.
Wendi
Release Negative Anchors - a CD with a great process to un-trigger your painful emotions.
And none of those nasty side effects. It is free this week. Go back here for more info.
Article about Memory Accessing
Bad memories could be a thing of the past
Published: Friday, December 30, 2005
Researchers at McGill University in Montreal are working on a way to alter victims' recollection of events such as domestic violence, childhood abuse, assault, rape, vehicle crashes and other traumatic events.
The intent is not to erase memory of the events, but to ease the pain of their recollection.
The experiments build on a discovery five years ago that the act of recalling an emotionally charged memory returns the memory to a state where it can be tampered with or stopped from "reconsolidating."
So far, 20 men and women suffering post-traumatic stress disorder have been seated, fitted with headphones and made to listen to a vivid retelling in their own voices of the traumatic event.
Half were given two doses of the drug propranolol, widely prescribed for hypertension and other chronic conditions; the other half a placebo. Then palm sweat, heart rate and other changes were assessed to determine if the physiological response to the traumatic story decreased among those who got the drug.
The results could be published in six months.
When humans take in new information -- whether it's a phone number, or seeing someone killed -- the memory is "labile" at first, or chemically unstable.
But long-term memories aren't nearly as hardwired as once thought.
Scientists now say that if a highly emotional memory is reactivated and those proteins blocked with a drug such as propranolol, it may be possible to stop the memory from being restabilized.
The goal is to, at the very least, dampen down traumatic memories.
"The propranolol is actually turning down the gradient of the emotionality of the trauma, so it's targeting the emotional memory," says Karim Nader, an associate professor of psychology at McGill.
Principle investigator Alain Brunet is quick to stress that what he and his collaborators are not doing is erasing memory, something they've already achieved in rats.
"It's not that people will no longer remember the trauma, but the memory will be less painful," says Brunet, assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at McGill.
Propranolol isn't the only memory-muting agent being tested.
Another is the antibiotic D-cycloserine, which is being used in conjunction with what's called extinction learning, according to Brunet.
"Let's say you were involved in a bad car accident with a red truck. The colour red will remind you of the car accident. That's fear conditioning.
"If I present the colour red over and over again, and nothing bad happens, at first it will remind you of your trauma. But eventually it will only very remotely remind you of your trauma. That's extinction learning."
Nader says the horror of post-traumatic stress disorder makes it almost unethical not to try. But the prospect of being able to swallow a pill to forget something you would rather not remember has some experts in the field more than a little skittish.
What about witnesses in criminal cases? What if the traumatic memory is only half wiped out, leaving a shadowy memory that's upsetting but the person can't fully understand why? And what if the pill takes good memories with it, so you forget happy memories of childhood?
"I believe such drugs will make us worse as people," Nobel Prize-winning memory researcher Eric Kandel told New Scientist in a cover story this month on the science of memory manipulation. Columbia University's Kandel says there's a reason people who do bad things are haunted by their memories.
"The nightmares make them a better person, because they realize the implication of their actions -- it feels bad to hurt other people."
Anyone facing a life-threatening situation releases a rush of stress hormones produced by the adrenal gland that prime the body to "fight, flee or freeze." That hormonal rush also boosts the brain's ability to form and retain emotional memories.
Propranolol has been shown to reduce memories by blocking those adrenergic pathways.