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LIFESTYLE / Health
You can forget the unhappy past: study
(Reuters)
Updated: 2007-07-13 09:47
WASHINGTON?- Researchers have confirmed what common wisdom has long held
-- that people can suppress emotionally troubling memories -- and said on
Thursday they have sketched out how the brain accomplishes this.
They said their findings might lead to a way to help patients with
post-traumatic stress disorder or anxiety to gain control of debilitating
memories.
"You're shutting down parts of the brain that are responsible for
supporting memories," said Brendan Depue, a neuroscience doctoral student
at the University of Colorado who worked on the study. He said his team
discovered the brain's emotional center is also shut down.
For their study, Depue and colleagues taught 18 adult volunteers to
associate pictures of human faces with pictures of car crashes or wounded
soldiers. They were then shown each face a dozen times and asked to
either remember or forget the troubling image associated with each one.
When they worked to block a particular negative image, then looked at the
face one last time, they could no longer name its troubling pair in about
half of the trials, Depue and his colleagues report in Friday's issue of
the journal Science.
The researchers used a brain imaging method called functional magnetic
resonance imaging, or fMRI, which shows the brain's activity in real
time, to track what was going on in the brain. They got usable data on 16
people.
In the test, parts of each volunteer's prefrontal cortex -- the brain's
control center for complex thoughts and actions -- were activated. This
seemed to direct a decrease of activity in the visual cortex, where
images are usually processed.
The hippocampus, where memories are formed and retrieved, and amygdala,
the emotion hub, were later also deactivated.
SUPPRESSION THERAPY?
The research is still far from being translated to the psychiatrist's
office, Depue and others acknowledged.
"In the first place, the stimuli may be unpleasant, but they are hardly
traumatic," said the University of California Berkeley's John Kihlstrom,
who was not involved in the study.
"My prediction is it won't be as easy to suppress something that's
long-standing and personally emotional," Depue said.
People with post-traumatic stress disorder are often troubled for decades
by recurring images of a harrowing experience.
Still, patients might practice blocking such memories out of their minds,
or at least reducing their emotional sting.
"It might be the case that people with memory disturbances have to gain
some control over the memory representation by remembering it (and)
trying a different emotional response to the memory before successful
suppression," Depue said.
A drug targeting specific brain regions might eventually boost the
ability to suppress, said John Gabrieli at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
For a mother haunted by the memory of her son's suicide, he said, "it is
hard to imagine that you'd ever get her to forget that the event
occurred. (But) the more you could weaken the memory in any dimension,
the better it would be."
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