Think of your brain as a Whac-A-Mole game at an arcade. Each mole is a memory. When you conjure up a memory, the mole comes out of it’s hole. Then the mole returns to its hole just as your memory returns to its spot in your brain. If you happen to give that mole a whac during the moment it shows itself, it returns to the hole somehow altered.
While the moles in the Whac-A-Mole game are pretty sturdy, it turns out that memories that emerge from their storage area in your brain are vulnerable to possible aleration.
[This theory] has to do with a process called memory reconsolidation. The idea is that after someone calls up a memory, it has to be stored in the brain anew. During this process, the memory is in a changeable state.
Now imagine you are a patient who suffers from extreme post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). What if you could call up the stressful memory, and when it emerges, alter it enough so that it is less emotion-packed when it is re-stored in your brain.
McGill University Psychologist Alain Brunet has successfully treated PTSD patients by giving them a dose of a blood pressure medicine called propranolol at the moment they are describing their painful memories.
When Patrick Moreau first came into his office suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the Canadian soldier, who had served as a United Nations peacekeeper in Bosnia, could hardly bear to recount the details of the day he was taken hostage in 1993. The memory—of kneeling on the ground with his hands on his head, legs shaking, a stark line of trees across the sky—aroused crippling fear that felt as fresh as it had 15 years before. The glimpse of a particular tree line through his windshield was enough to bring the memory rushing back, giving him such violent shakes that he would have to pull off the road.
But six months after participating in Brunet’s clinical trial, Moreau no longer meets the diagnostic criteria for PTSD.
There are many ongoing studies related to memory alteration and the results could change the way we think about treating severe anxiety disorders. In the meantime, I keep picturing my shrink standing over me with a giant mallet and saying, “Bring it on.”
