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Sleep
Therapy Can Change Bad Memories
Forget the psychiatrist’s couch. Your own bed could one day
be a setting for psychotherapy. Targeted brain training during sleep can lessen
the effects of fearful memories, according to a study published today in Nature
Neuroscience. Researchers say that the technique could ultimately be used to
treat psychiatric disorders, such as phobias and post-traumatic stress
disorders.Today, those conditions are most commonly treated using ‘exposure
therapy’, which requires patients to intentionally relive their fears. With
repeated exposures in the safety of a therapist’s consulting room, patients can
learn to reduce their responses to traumatic cues — suggesting that memories
are being altered. But the treatment itself can be intolerably painful for some
patients, especially at first. In the latest study, neuroscientist Katherina
Hauner and her colleagues at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern
University in Chicago, Illinois, devised a form of exposure therapy that works
while people snooze.“It’s fascinating, and very promising,” says Daniela
Schiller, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. “We
used to think you need awareness and conscious understanding of your emotional
responses in order to change them.”
Instant
replay
To create fearful memories, Hauner’s team delivered mild
electric shocks to study participants as they viewed pictures of faces that
were paired with a distinct odor, such as lemon or mint. People began to sweat
slightly on seeing the pictures and smelling the odors, anticipating that they
would get a shock.
Soon after the training, participants napped in the lab
while the researchers monitored their brain waves with electrodes placed on
their scalps. When the volunteers entered slow-wave sleep — a stage during
which recent memories are replayed and reinforced — the team released one of
the fear-linked odors. By administering the odor at 30-second intervals, the
researchers were trying to trigger the memory of the corresponding face over
and over again — this time without delivering electric shocks. Just like when
they were awake, the sleeping subjects showed increased sweating when exposed
to the odor, but the effect gradually subsided.
The reduced effect persisted after sleep. When awake, people
showed diminished fear responses when exposed to the odor–face combination that
had been triggered repeatedly during sleep. Activity changes in the amygdala, a
region of the brain involved in emotion and fear, suggest that the treatment
did not erase the fearful memory, but rather that it created new, innocuous
associations with the odor–face combination. People who slept longer and
received more treatment benefited most from the procedure.
“It’s really paradoxical,” says Jan Born, a neuroscientist
at the University of Tübingen in Germany, noting that the spontaneous replay of
memories during sleep is typically thought to strengthen rather than weaken
learning.
Hauner explains that repeated activation of a single fearful
memory during sleep probably works more like real exposure therapy and less
like a natural replay of memories at night, in which memories are triggered
haphazardly. More work is needed, she says, to determine how long the treatment
lasts and whether overnight sleep might affect it.
As for using the technique therapeutically, Hauner notes
that real traumatic memories, especially very old ones, could be much more
complicated to treat than the simple scenarios engineered in the lab. “This is
a very novel area,” she says. “I think the process has to be refined.”
