Changing Memories to Treat PTSD

A controversial area of brain research suggests it may be possiblebut is it ethical?

Before he lost the ability to sleep through the night; before the panic attacks started; before he drove his truck over an improvised explosive device, leaving him with traumatic brain injury; before a second roadside bomb did the same thing a few weeks laterbefore all of that, on the U.S. military base near Kandahar, Afghanistan, soldier Kevin Martin liked to think about the science-fiction movie Inception.

My friends and I used to joke during our time in Afghanistan that we were going to take all the money we had and pay someone to Incept us, he saysreferencing the films premise of implanting or extracting information from a persons mind as they sleepso that we could put a cooler, not-as-bad memory of Afghanistan in our brains and go on with the rest of our lives.

Thus far, no such treatment exists for Martin, 23, who returned to the U.S. in 2012 and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder earlier this year. Now a sophomore at Trinity College, hes considered 30 percent disabled by the Department of Veterans Affairs for his PTSD (hes also 10 percent disabled for an unrelated shoulder injury) and takes prescription anti-anxiety medication to ease his symptoms.

Trauma Is Contagious

But researchers have begun to investigate a possible treatment similar to the one Martin imagined: A paper recently published in the journal Biological Psychiatry argues that it may be possible to treat PTSD by altering patients memories.

The paper reviews a growing body of scientific literature on memory reconsolidation, a relatively new (and, in humans, still somewhat contentious) concept in which old information is called to mind, modified with the help of drugs or behavioral interventions, and then re-stored with new information incorporatedlike a piece of metal thats been melted down, remolded, and left to harden into a different shape.

Though different types of memories are solidified in different waysthe fear-driven memory of driving over a bomb, for example, will make its way through the brain differently than a mundane memory of yesterdays breakfastthere are general neurological processes that all memories follow.

In memory research, we talk about three parts, explains Ken Paller, director of the cognitive neuroscience program at Northwestern University. The first part is the acquisition or coding of a memory, in which our brains process the information our senses are sending, and the last part is retrieving a memory. And in between, we talk about consolidation, the process by which sensory informationa sight, a tastesolidifies into fully-formed memories to be stored for the long term.

Typically, the more often memories are recalled, the stronger they become. If youre trying to memorize something in a book, you sit there and repeat it over and over, explains Wendy Suzuki, a researcher at New York Universitys Center for Neural Science. Thats also an example of how things get consolidated. You repeat [them] over and over.

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Changing Memories to Treat PTSD