Is there a way to get rid of bad memories?

Blue Monday or Blue Day is not easy at all. The combination of bad memories, uncertainty and negative experiences strive to make the third Monday in January a very bitter pill to swallow. For those who suffer from tormenting events that seem like a “curse”, psychologists have been trying for decades to reduce or completely suppress those memories with difficult emotional charge. Until now, attempts had failed, but A team of Hong Kong researchers believe they have found a way, using the association between words and memories, and acoustic stimulation of the brain during sleep.

Not even at night is the brain at rest

The brain works incessantly to put the events of the day in order and make the memory of our experiences stable and lasting.transforming them into long-term memories. This is what is called “memory consolidation”, in very general terms, it consists of the reactivation of lived experiences, which reinforces the stability of memories while taking into account their relevance and other information from the brain organ.

To this day, several of these processes remain a mystery. However, neuroscientists have long been able to exploit the memory consolidation that occurs during sleep to guide and reinforce the creation of new memories. Named “selective memory reactivation”, is carried out by associating a sensory stimulus: such as a sound or a smell to an experience, and then experiencing it during non-REM sleep, the phase in which memory consolidation mainly occurs, in order to stimulate the brain to relive the memory of the experience and thus reinforce it. The technique has also long been studied to do the opposite: weaken or erase unwanted memories. But to date, research results in this field have been less concise.

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The bottlenose dolphin moved to an area out of reach of its cetacean friends in the Baltic Sea. Danish scientists suggest that their whistles could also be a call to the herd, although that is unlikely.

What do the experts propose?

He new study published in the magazine Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesproposes a “double strategy.” In the first phase, a new memory associated with the negative one is exposed to intervene in the latter, and then, the new memory is reanimated during sleep seeking the selective reactivation of the memory.

The experiment developed like this. On the first day, the scientists showed a group of volunteers a series of negative images: injured people or dangerous animals. They then used mnemonic exercises to associate a meaningless word with each of them. The next day, after a night of sleep in which the new memories had had time to consolidate, the mnemonic practice was repeated, this time associating positive images: smiling children, idyllic landscapes, etc.; all of them with half of the words used in the previous session. That night, the specialists resorted to selective memory reactivation, resonating the nonsense words associated with the images during the REM phase of the participants’ sleep.

When studying the participants’ brain waves, the researchers observed a peak in theta waves, associated with emotional memory, when they heard the words associated with positive images. A good sign, which was also confirmed by the tests carried out in the following days. The researchers concluded that it was more difficult for participants to remember picture-word associations in which negative images had been overwritten by positive ones.

Do you want to erase memories from your brain? There are already people working on the solution

Didn’t we agree that this was not a good idea? Well, there are research laboratories that develop studies and technologies that we always believed were impossible.

Give your mind a rest

At the moment these are completely preliminary results, obtained within the framework of a strictly controlled laboratory experiment.and working on negative memories with a very low emotional charge compared to those that can induce the appearance of psychological and psychiatric problems: such as grief, violence or accidents.

Despite the limitations listed, its inventors mention that this technique “is promising and is worth continuing to investigate in the future.” Even if it does not eliminate bad memories, but reduces their “strength” and therefore their ability to interfere with daily life, it would have excellent therapeutic potential. By fine-tuning the sensory stimuli used to reactivate memory, the areas of the brain involved and the dream phrases in which they intervene, it could be possible to further optimize their effectiveness.

Article originally published in WIRED Italy. Adapted by Alondra Flores.