We ’re still a far elbow room off from the kind of memory erasure portrayed in the motion picture Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , but a recent experimentation has just taken us one step nigher . By using electroconvulsive therapy on depressed patient role , scientists were able-bodied to break up their ability to recall emotionally jarring events .
Every time we return a memory we have to take it out of our mental storehouse banks . According to theory , these computer storage have to be re - written back onto the brain ’s circuit each them they ’re accessed . It ’s an imperfect process called computer storage reconsolidation , and it ’s the all-important idea behind a recent experiment conducted by Marijn Kroes and his fellow worker from Radboud University Nijmegen .
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By using electroconvulsive therapy ( ECT ) , which was once call electroshock therapy , the neuroscientist were hope to disrupt this reconsolidation mental process . They wanted to disturb the re - formation of disturb or undesirable memory board in patients sustain from depression . In hereafter , a more urbane technique could be used to treat mental trauma , psychiatric disorder , and drug addiction .
For the experiment , Kroes took 39 patient who were undergoing ECT for dangerous depression ( ECT work by drop dead electrical currents to parts of the brain , which triggers a brief seizure ; patients are given muscle relaxants and an anesthetic ) . Each patient was involve to watch two rather disconcerting videos , one about a minor who is strike by a car and has to have his foot severed by surgeon , the other involving a pair of sis , one of whom is kidnapped and sexually assaulted .
A week by and by , the patient were asked to call back item about one of the two stories ( not both ) , after which time they were at random sorted into three group , A , B , and C ( a control group ) .
extremity of Group A and B were treated with ECT immediately following the retelling of the story . The following twenty-four hour period , Group A participants had to finish a multiple - choice quiz about both report . Fascinatingly , they did a expert problem recollect the story for which their memories had n’t been reactivate ( or reconsolidated ) . Their callback ability for the recounted chronicle was no sound than hazard . Group B , on the other hand , had their memory tested about 90 minutes after the ECT , and their recall abilities were inviolate — suggesting that it takes time to deflower a computer memory . Group C did not find electroconvulsive therapy at all , and their recall abilities were substantial , indicating that both ECT and reconsolidation is required to impair memory board recall .
So this study furthers the memory reconsolidation possibility . The technique could also prove utile for therapists — albeit a very blunt one .
take the total bailiwick at Nature Communications : “ An electroconvulsive therapy function impairs reconsolidation of episodic computer memory in human being . ”
Neuroscience , memory , memory integration , electroconvulsive therapy , memory erasure , skill
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