How to erase all negative memories of the past? How to erase unpleasant memories.
It means a combination of hypnosis with the use of various drugs that selectively erase part of the memory. Why is it so difficult? After all, hypnosis works. The fact is that for every hypnotist there is another hypnotist of a higher class. What was hidden in a blocked area of memory can often be restored. Therefore, it is much easier to erase incriminating information and turn a person into an unconscious slave.
Experiments to destroy memory are not a new phenomenon. And it is characteristic not only of Russia. Alas! This method was used in different countries, depriving the memory of those who could cause some harm. The fact that we did this too is no secret. Moreover, it was not criminal structures that were involved, but government ones, and this happened back in the days when there was a powerful network of institutions of the military-industrial complex in the country.
It was the employees of these institutions who were made into obedient executors of “special orders” who would never, under any circumstances, tell anyone anything. And not because they will keep the secret, despite torture, but simply because they do not remember this secret. You can cut them into pieces, try the most terrifying means of intimidation, but torture is of absolutely no use. A person simply cannot tell what he does not remember.
It is interesting that corpses with traces of monstrous torture were discovered in different places, which were identified as the bodies of famous businessmen in the present and people related to the secrets of the CPSU Central Committee in the past; perhaps these are murders from that category?
A very interesting trail follows all these dark and brutal murders, as well as incomprehensible suicides that occurred from 1991 to 1994.
The Central Committee knows how to keep its secrets securely. And what is more reliable than something completely transparent and... empty for those who want to know the secrets of the brain? Some died, others were killed. The secret died with them.
How to erase a person's memory
How can a person be forced to voluntarily undergo such influence? Who would agree to lose their memory? Who told you it was voluntary? After all, this is not at all difficult: a regular injection of a drug developed at a research institute, for example, during a general flu vaccination or instead of an injection of vitamins.
Violent treatment is also used, which not a single person subjected to hypnosis will remember. Intoxication with certain “medicines” causes special susceptibility to hypnotic influence. And some corrections in the brain can be done using a hardware method, literally burning out “dangerous” areas of the brain with a laser.
In general, with the brain in such poisoning, you can do whatever you want:
- Destroy memory.
- Implant a chip that will allow you to track the movement of the “object” and program the person to self-destruct.
You don’t even need spectacular actions like flying out of a window or hanging from the handle of a window frame. As simple as day - sudden cardiac arrest. At this point, any doctor will register a heart attack. Although the cause of such a strange heart attack would not be a bad heart, but an order from the brain to immediately stop cardiac activity.
Who could be behind such a disgrace? Those, of course, who must guard certain secrets. And who guards the secrets? You are quite capable of answering this question yourself.
In August 2000, the VID television company invited seven people who had lost their memory and a whole council of psychiatrists to participate in the program. The whole country closely followed the discussion. The questions that doctors were asked were simple: why did these people completely lose their memory? What could have prompted them to do this? After all, it is known that no traces of violence were found, many of the victims did not have toxic substances in their blood.
Many, but not all. Such substances were found in the blood of several people. Doctors found traces of a potent drug in it. psychotropic substances. This substance could not be identified. It is only clear that it has enormous destructive power.
One of the Penza doctors is convinced: if a person was really poisoned by some unknown substance, then it was probably not just one drug, but some kind of “explosive mixture” psychotropic drug-based substances. Nowadays, quite a lot of chemicals of dangerous composition and action are smuggled into the country from abroad.
Manipulation of human consciousness
Who uses these substances? Who experiments on people? One of those who lost their memory managed to escape from “slavery”, where he worked at some vodka factory, obviously for criminal structures, and was injected with an unknown drug.
All patients were men of approximately the same age range. As experts explain this situation, age plays a vital role in our investigation. This is the very age when people achieve the greatest success both in their personal lives and in their careers. It is 30-40 year old men who “move” the economy and science. They have productive ideas. They occupy prestigious positions. Money and power are concentrated in the hands of many of them.
Someone or something is trying to control people in this age range! Someone or something is trying to infiltrate our lives, pushing out the most thoughtful members of society!
It is also important that among those who lost their memory there were no people without qualifications. And this qualification is the only thing they have “of their own” left.
But what do experts think about this?
Igor Smirnov, academician, head of the Institute of Psychoecology
“Why do people lose their memory? There are many conjectures on this matter. They often talk about drugs and technologies that make it possible to artificially, as it were, cut out part of consciousness. Do not physically “remove” a witness to an incident, but simply remove the memory of this incident.
Methods that make it possible to penetrate a person’s consciousness, “erase” part of the information from his brain, and even change his personality, do exist. Some of these methods, developed by doctors for the treatment of severe psychosomatic disorders, were stolen from their developers, doctors, and could actually fall into the hands of criminal groups.
You can erase part of a person’s memory using psychotropic drugs, psychotropic weapon, and modern electronic methods of access to the subconscious. However, science has long known the following case: having experienced severe stress, a person loses part of his memory on his own, without outside pressure. This is a protective function of the body: the brain removes information that is so fatal that it can kill. There are many cases where a person loses memory as a result of traumatic brain injury or cerebral hemorrhage.
You can restore your memory using modern scientific knowledge, although no one can give a 100% guarantee. Sometimes memory itself is restored over time, and it is often difficult to determine whether the memory returned thanks to the help of doctors or the brain itself gradually returned to normal.
At our institute we worked with such patients and, thanks to methods of accessing the subconscious, we restored their memory to one degree or another. At least enough for a person to remember himself, his family and most of his biography.”
Writer V. Ya. Rasputin provides the following data.
“The creator of the generator, Doctor of Medical Sciences Yakov Rudakov, a former employee of the “number institute,” explains that the generator can emit a beam that “hits” a distance of several hundred meters, or expand it, and then it will affect a large hall or stadium. A kind of artificial hypnosis. It can put you to sleep, tone you up, cause hallucinations, sharply deteriorate your vision, and act on the brain with NLP.
The action of the psychotronic generator is based on the resonance effect. With the help of a generator, you can deprive a person of the ability to take meaningful actions and force them to do anything, for example, throw themselves out of a window after hearing some rare phrase.
The head of the Center for Psychophysiology of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, Colonel V. Zvonnikov, explains that the NLP method affects the human subconscious, and at least 95 percent of the information received by the brain goes there. This feature allows you to influence his psyche unnoticed by a person.
NLP is not the only direction of psychotronics; the radio-acoustic effect of microwaves is known; if you direct a beam of a microwave generator at a person and modulate it with a voice, then the person will hear what is being said at a very considerable distance from him, and there will be an effect as if the voice sounds “right in brain." It is these voices that many of those who consider themselves victims of psychotronic weapons complain about. But who will talk to them, except psychiatrists. And they have their own view on the problem of the “inner voice” - a long-described phenomenon called mental automatism, or Kandinsky-Clerambault syndrome.
According to Deputy General Director of NPO Energia, Doctor of Biological Sciences Valery Kanyuka, the NPO was developing means of remote influence on humans. The work was carried out in pursuance of the secret resolution of the CPSU Central Committee of January 27, 1986, and in 1989 equipment was already created that, when launched into orbit, could correct the behavior of the population in an area equal to the Krasnodar Territory. The equipment was manufactured in Kyiv, at the Arsenal plant.
Professor V. Sedletsky, from the Kyiv Institute of Materials Science Problems, dealt with similar problems, and biogenerators were produced at the Oktava plant. These works were completed in August 1990. The experiments were carried out on animals and highly paid volunteers."
And when we didn’t want to look for volunteers, we experimented on those we didn’t feel sorry for—ordinary people.
Every person has difficult memories from the past, which I would like to get rid of.
Unpleasant events and negative experiences provoke, preventing you from moving on and maintaining harmonious relationships with others.
Is it possible tear pages out of the memory book to start over without the heavy burden of memories?
Is it possible to erase a person's memory?
Special exercises
"Rite"
The essence of the exercise is to get rid of bad memories in the form of a ritual. A person responds well to various psychological anchors created by psychotechnics.
- Option 1. Wash away memories by pouring water on yourself. It is necessary to imagine a negative experience in the form of dirt or dust adhering to the body. In the process, the water washes away all this dirt, freeing the consciousness.
If fantasy is developed well enough, the technique will help you completely get rid of worries about negative experiences.
- Option 2. Burn your memories by first writing them down on a piece of paper. It is better to describe the event or situation in as much detail as possible in order to draw the emotions out. Then it will be easier to remove them thanks to the visual sequence of human actions.
- Option 3. You can bury memories if there is something associated with a negative event. In this case, you can arrange an impromptu funeral for this thing, mentally connecting and burying all negative emotions with it.
"Perception"
You need to remember the events like a fragment from a movie, i.e. watching him from the side.
Now you can start:
- scroll through the situation in your head, trying on the role of each participant in the event;
- scroll through the situation in your head as if you were looking at what is happening through a TV screen, changing the playback speed from minimum to maximum;
- “color” the picture, observing it in green, red, blue;
- Zoom in and out of people participating in dialogues.
All this will help reduce the significance of the event and the individual people involved in the situation.
How to get rid of unpleasant memories from your head?
And events from memory can be done even at the everyday level. Memories are formed from images and elements around us.
Example: A person doesn’t just remember going to the cinema. He remembers the smell of popcorn, the smile of the inspector, the plot of the movie, the laughter of the child sitting next to him, the dim light, etc.
All this forms a complete memory of the event. If disassemble a memorable day into components, and forget some of them, the memory will lose clarity and brightness.
This means you need to remove all things and elements that remind you of events or a person.
Here you have to go from simple to complex.
First we remove all obvious clues: correspondence on social networks and items directly related to the incident, photographs and other “artifacts”.
After this, we remove the emotional component: perfume, music, clothing and other attributes that may evoke memories of what happened.
Regardless of what events happen in life, it is important to accept reality and move on.
After all, it is humility helps to let go of the situation and not return to it again and again, diligently trying to escape from difficult memories.
Is it possible to erase bad memories? Find out about it in the video:
Memory is one of the most important, influencing his entire life. And many people take the problem of developing their memory skills very seriously. Fortunately, there are a huge number of opportunities today: various trainings, courses, seminars and other training programs. If a person has a need to improve his memory, he can easily find suitable materials. However, much less attention is paid to the problem of forgetting, although its importance is no less. After all, many of us often have a desire to get rid of some memories, feelings from the past, and simply free our memory from unnecessary information. This is exactly what we decided to talk about.
Among the many methods designed to improve memory, there are special methods designed for intentional forgetting. Their totality is called flying technology. The term itself is rooted in Greek mythology, in which the well-known river Lethe was often mentioned (remember the common expression “sink into oblivion”). Lethe is the river of oblivion, which was located in the underground domain of Hades. Dead souls who entered his kingdom, having drunk water from Lethe, forever forgot that they had ever lived.
So what are the benefits of flying technology and what exactly is it used for? To begin with, it is worth saying that the property of human memory to forget is its integral component, because thanks to it, mnemonic processes are complete. And many Russian and foreign psychologists have talked and are talking about this. It is the ability to forget that helps a person erase from memory something that happened in the past, but has a destructive effect on the psyche and personality in the present, as well as any information that is irrelevant at the moment. These are the two main reasons why it is recommended to master forgetting techniques.
There are two main flight techniques: suppression and removal. Let's consider each of them separately.
Suppression
This method is considered specifically as a psychotherapeutic one, i.e. thanks to him, it becomes possible to forget what has a traumatic effect on the psyche. Often, some memories of negative events bother people and come to mind more and more often because of their vivid emotional coloring. A person begins to react sharply to this, to be afraid of these memories, and they become stronger. To eliminate these and other various obsessive thoughts, two exercises are usually used.
"Burning Letter"
Write down on a piece of paper all the memories that make you feel negative emotions. Describe them in full detail. Then take this sheet, crumple it and place it in a pre-prepared fireproof container. Set fire to the crumpled sheet. Watch the flame. And while the leaf burns, imagine how all the memories that bother you burn with it, and then turn into ashes. As soon as the paper completely burns out, scatter the ashes to the wind, throwing them, for example, out the window.
The essence of this exercise is that it not only helps you get rid of unnecessary memories, but also becomes their master. It is by having the opportunity to manage his memories that a person can get rid of them. This may even be unpleasant to some extent, but the result is worth it, because a person no longer needs to defend himself from annoying thoughts or suppress them, because he can simply describe them and burn them. And fire, as we know, has always been the best psychotherapist for people: looking at it, people were cleansed of what was psychologically pressing on them, “threw a heavy burden off their shoulders.” If a person has a vivid imagination, he is able to almost literally imagine how his troubles and misfortunes burn together with the paper, freeing his memory from a heavy burden.
"TV"
Sit in a comfortable chair or sofa and take a comfortable body position. Try to project your negative experiences in detail onto a large television screen created in your imagination. After that, pick up the same imaginary remote control and turn off the sound of your “movie”. Watch it as a silent movie. Then gradually make the image blurry and dull. Imagine that it becomes less and less bright and disappears completely.
The most important thing in this exercise is not to rush. There is no need to try to complete the entire exercise in a couple of minutes. On the contrary, you need the process to be as detailed as possible. For example, you can imagine how, after the picture disappears, you turn off the TV, unplug the power cord, pick up the TV, bring it to the window and throw it away.
You can also get creative with the film itself: change the plot from drama to comedy. Model the continuation of the situation in a comical version, put a funny melody or a stupid song on the image, imagine that the role is played not by you, but by one of the comedians. Become the director of your memories - this way you can manage and control them. If you don't need them, throw them out of your “video library”.
Even if “Burning Letter” and “TV” do not completely rid you of memories, you will no longer be afraid of them in any case. And if you are not afraid of them, then they will probably become indifferent to you. And what is indifferent to a person rarely disturbs his memory.
Removal
This is the second flying method. It is intended to a greater extent to remove from memory information that has lost its relevance and represents only mental and emotional garbage. Several exercises can be distinguished in the removal technique.
"Flight technical rag"
For example, your memory contains unnecessary images (words, people, pictures, data), which, although they do not have a negative effect, distract your attention and interfere with concentration, free flow of thoughts, etc. Imagine all this information figuratively reflected on a large chalkboard. Then imagine taking a wet rag and erasing all those blocks of this information that you don’t need. In empty spaces, new images may form, related to the previous ones or associated with those nearby. Take the rag again and continue washing. Do this until nothing appears in the empty space. This technique is suitable if there is little information, because... you can divide the board into several sectors and clear each of them in turn.
"Images on Film"
There are cases when the amount of information is large and a simple “flying rag” may not work. Then you can transform this technique a little. Imagine that all the images being recreated are displayed on the same board, but only it is covered with an opaque film. Fill this entire film with unnecessary data, and then simply pull it off the board, immediately freeing up a large space on a new film stretched over the same board. The presented technique was used at one time by the outstanding Soviet and Russian journalist, professional mnemonist and owner of a phenomenal memory, Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky.
Recording
This is another technique that S.V. used. Shereshevsky. He said that he always found it funny that people write down everything they want to remember, because if a person writes it down, why should he remember it? He decided that if he wrote something down, then he did not need to remember it. This became one of the laws of forgetting developed by Shereshevsky, which he began to apply whenever he needed to forget something not particularly important: telephone numbers, people's names, etc. You can use this technique too. Just note that the more a person writes down, the less he uses his memory, and the less he uses his memory, the less trained it is and the less he can remember. Therefore, the less he writes down, the more he will train his memory, and the more he will remember. And it turns out that the information being recorded is information that should not be imprinted in memory, which means it can be safely forgotten. A very good reception, although to many it seems somewhat paradoxical.
In conclusion, I would like to add that the more you practice forgetting unnecessary information, the faster you will master this skill. After some time, the need to use any techniques will disappear by itself, because... You can forget any information and erase memories only with the help of one volitional effort, by giving your brain the appropriate command.
Don't forget to leave a comment. We will also be interested to know which of the forgetting techniques discussed seems most effective to you.
In this article I will tell you why it is necessary to get rid of bad memories, where bad memories come from and how to get rid of bad memories using special techniques for working with the subconscious. Many people suffer from a lot of painful memories from their past. The average person has quite a lot of such memories.
Bad memories burden life in all its manifestations.
They are like devourers of your happiness and freedom. Bad memories create various clamps in the body and illnesses. Bad memories force people to constantly mentally return to the past to specific episodes of life when it was bad and unpleasant, while experiencing anger, resentment, disappointment and other types of negative emotions. At the same time, a person carries with him all his life a whole bunch of bad memories from the past. Bad memories give rise to various complexes, bad relationships with people, and lack of self-love. These memories exacerbate the overall negative reaction to all events in life.
Where do bad memories come from?
Bad memories take their roots from the moment of birth to the present day. But the strongest roots of memories grow from childhood; it is in childhood that a child absorbs everything like a sponge, and as he grows up, these memories increasingly leave an imprint on his entire life.
Techniques for working with the subconscious to rid yourself of bad memories. (In my articles earlier, I already wrote (,):
1.BSFF (become free quickly)
With the help of this technique, it is possible to get rid of quite painful memories in a fairly short time. The BSFF book is freely available on the Internet. You can download it there. The essence of this technique for working with bad memories is that you take any bad memory and break it down into parts, phrases (that is, write down everything you think about this memory, all the pain it causes you without censorship, as is. After this, you need to pronounce each phrase adding a key phrase at the end.
2. Ho'oponopono method.
This method uses four phrases: “I'm so sorry,” “Please forgive me,” “I love you,” “I thank you.” Just when you have any bad and depressing memories, repeat these four phrases and they will cure you of all this pain. The distorting information contained in these memories will begin to change towards harmony and well-being.
3. GP-4 equipment
This technique of merging the negative by merging the so-called polarities using two symmetrical acupressure points, which are located at the base of the right and left eyebrows. In general, I have already written 2 articles about this technique, you can read them.
Especially for the RIA Science section >>
Douglas Fields
I will never forget this. They attached electrodes to my wrist, activated a black arrow on a scary electronic device with many switches and buttons, and then repeatedly shocked me with electrical shocks. No, it was not torture, and my memories of those events are not traumatic. I was in the laboratory of Dr. Daniela Schiller, a psychologist at New York's Mt. Sinai Medical School, where she underwent the same procedures that she and her colleagues used to discover new ways to change traumatic memories. Her team's recent research suggests a method for erasing traumatic memories stored in a part of the brain called the amygdala, not just about suppressing them, as is the case today in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. stress disorder (PTSD), but also about changes in memory itself.
Like other participants in the study, I stared at a computer monitor while my right wrist was wired to an electrical stimulator to deliver pain-inducing electrical shocks. The second set of touch electrodes—two Velcro strips with wires attached—were placed like rings on the pads of two fingers of my left hand. They took measurements of the level of nervous perspiration I produced. Sweaty palms are an involuntary reaction to danger; It is part of the body's fight-or-flight response, which occurs in the mind and body when deciding whether to defend against an attack or flee. The heart is pounding, the stomach is twisting, the muscles are cramping from the injection of adrenaline, large drops of sweat appear on the forehead, and our consciousness is heightened and puts all body systems on high alert in order to survive in a situation that poses a mortal danger.
These are all bodily sensations of fear, and it is the same reaction that occurs in people suffering from panic attacks as well as other fear-related disorders. Fear is a life-saving quick response, but for some people with fear-related disorders or PTSD, the overwhelming fear causes complete incapacitation. The problem within the brain is that panic can be unduly triggered by stimuli that are irrelevant to the actual threat. Horror can take over people without warning, and sometimes it ruins their lives. Some are deprived of sleep. Others are hesitant to go outside or unable to fly. Military veterans may suddenly panic when they hear a sound associated in their memory with a previous trauma.
A recent study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals a new discovery about how the brain remembers and regulates the memory of fear-inducing events. To understand the new findings, it will be helpful to learn more about memories stored in memory, threats, and how PTSD, panic attacks, and other fear-related disorders are treated today.
Modern behavioral therapy used to treat fear-related disorders uses exposure therapy. It is based on the study of animal behavior, during which a painful stimulus receives an associative connection with another stimulus, which in itself does not pose a danger. For example, if a rat hears the ringing of a bell and then receives a weak electric shock, then it quickly understands that the bell is a harbinger of unpleasant pain. Ring the bell again and the rat will freeze in fear even if you don't shock it. This conditioned fear response is similar to the way many of us learned as children not to stick a pin in an electrical outlet or play with matches.
Over time, we stopped being afraid of matchboxes and electrical outlets, and this happened after a lot of follow-up without causing us any harm. This is exactly how exposure therapy works. A soldier who survives a horrific roadside bomb in Afghanistan may develop great fears about driving. Psychiatrists are able to treat a person's fear by repeatedly driving the person in a safe environment until the horror of the bomb gradually fades. This method can be useful, but exposure therapy often does not bring the desired results.
“Some of the bravest people I know are those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder,” Schiller told me as I sat with wires and sensors connected to her experimental machine. According to her, this is because, unlike individuals who may actually be fearless, people with PTSD bravely try to cope with endless horror and continue to lead normal lives.
Instead of suppressing fear, it would be better to break the memory connection between the bomb explosion and the normal experience of driving a car.
“Memory change is a natural process that happens every day in our lives. We create false memories quite often in everyday life,” notes Schiller. So instead of suppressing fear, scientists are trying to change the conditioned fear response stored inside our brains.
Overdubbing another recording
Scientists have learned a lot about how memories are stored and how emotional memories are suppressed. A paired structure located deep in our brain, called the amygdala, is an important focus of activity for detecting fear, learning about it, and monitoring the body's emotional state and psychological responses to danger. The prefrontal cortex, located just behind the forehead, can inhibit neural activity in the amygdala and suppress its response to fear-related experiences. This circuitry, which exists in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, shows how exposure therapy suppresses anxiety and fear.
Neuroscientists have also recently discovered that when a particular memory location is activated, that location remains vulnerable for some time and can be changed or even destroyed. Remembering an event is similar to how we take a book off a shelf in order to familiarize ourselves with its contents. At this point, the book may be changed or even destroyed, and in addition, it must be placed in the appropriate place on the shelf. If you disturb a person's attention while browsing, the book can easily end up out of place. The process of rearranging memory on the shelf immediately after accessing this area is called reconsolidation, and as a result of the research, it was possible to establish the details of how this happens, down to certain molecules in the synapse that encode information.
The word reconsolidation may seem strange, but it makes sense when you consider why memory exists in the first place. Essentially, memory allows us to use past experiences to properly guide our future behavior. This means that memory must be updated because things change. So, for example, your memory of Obama has undoubtedly changed since the first time you heard the name. Your memory is richer, connected to many additional experiences and separated from other data that is no longer relevant or has been forgotten.
“In principle, reconsolidation suggests that in order to change memories, you must first retrieve them,” explains Schiller. Instead of, for example, suppressing the fear associated with driving through repeated experiences of driving in a safe environment, she suggests, the terrorizing connection between the traumatic memory of a roadside bomb and the normal experience of being inside a car can be broken. If a traumatic memory is activated, it must be especially sensitive to the possibility of being destroyed. The electrodes on my wrist showed how Schiller and her team were beginning to test this idea.
A blue square flashed on the computer monitor. Soon after, a purple square appeared, followed by a painful electrical shock that made my fingers automatically tighten. Ay! Meanwhile, signals from the electrodes measuring sweat on the fingers were graphed on a computer monitor, which the scientists observed. This graphical trace, presented in real time, shot up the moment I was shocked. The pain triggered a response in my body related to the decision of whether to run or fight.
The next time the purple square appeared on the screen, the graph showing my sweat rate rose again - and this happened before I even felt the electric shock. My amygdala has already learned to associate the purple square with an electric shock. The appearance of the purple square on the screen had already triggered a flight-or-fight response in my body, just as it would for a combat veteran suffering from PTSD if he were to drive a car. In contrast, the blue square that regularly appeared on the monitor screen did not cause me to sweat or fear. The blue square was safe. Other participants in the experiment showed the same automatic fear response to the appearance of a purple square when they were subjected to the same test several days later.
But if specialists display a flashing purple square on the screen again and again, but without an electrical discharge, then the stress reaction to it will gradually weaken. This happens because the prefrontal cortex has learned that bad things don't necessarily happen every time a person sees a purple square, and it sends an inhibitory signal to the amygdala to suppress the threat response. Schiller and her colleagues, including neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux and psychologist Elizabeth Phelps of New York University, were able to monitor this process while participants were magnetically inside. -resonance tomograph. They saw that the prefrontal cortex became active in addition to the amygdala during extinction, and functional connections between it and the amygdala were strengthened. But when all participants were tested the next day, sensors attached to their fingers showed that the sight of a purple square often again triggered fear and startle responses. Exposure therapy helped, but the fear-inducing connection between the purple square and the electrical shock was still stored in the memory inside the amygdala.
New approach - activate and change
The team then tried to see if the reconsolidation mechanism could be used to break the connection between the purple square and the electrical shock. To do this, they simply reminded the subjects of the existence of this connection by displaying a purple square on the monitor screen and simultaneous electrical discharge. They then immediately began using exposure therapy (exposure to a square repeatedly without shock). It turned out that this option was much more effective in reducing the stress response to the purple square than what happens when using extinction therapy without first reminding the subject of the threat. By monitoring brain activity using magnetic resonance imaging, specialists were able to monitor how it works within the reflex arc (neural circuits).
Two things might answer the question of why attenuation therapy during the reconsolidation period is more effective. It is possible that the prefrontal cortex was actively suppressing the threat memory associated with the purple square, or alternatively, the association between the purple square and the painful electric shock stored in the amygdala may have been reduced. Magnetic resonance imaging showed that the prefrontal lobes were not activated in people who received extinction therapy during memory reconsolidation. In fact, the brain (the amygdala) forgot that there was a connection between the electrical shock and the purple square because the prefrontal cortex was not activated to suppress the memory of the threat. (To be precise, the experiments used a variety of controls, including three colored squares—one used for extinction therapy and one used for memory reconsolidation extinction—to allow comparison of the effectiveness of each approaches for all subjects).
To translate these new laboratory findings into real-life scenarios, imagine being accosted at a school bus stop by local bully John and his troubled brother Greg. Their sister Betty has never given you any problems, but every time you see John or Greg, you feel worried and afraid. But if time passes and none of them pester you, then your body's reaction to the threatening situation will gradually fade away, although you do not forget that they may pose a potential threat to you. An MRI scan of your brain would then show that your prefrontal cortex is suppressing the fear response in your amygdala that was triggered by John and Greg's past attack on you. This is how extinction works at the level of neural networks.
One morning, John begins to pester you again the moment you show up at the bus stop, but immediately after that he suddenly changes his behavior and begins to demonstrate a friendly attitude. After this, several days pass without any of the brothers causing you any trouble. So what happens the next time you see John and Greg? Your body shows no fear at the sight of John, but when Greg approaches you, your heart begins to race.
A functional magnetic resonance imaging scan would show that there is less neural activity between your brain's prefrontal cortex and your amygdala when you see John than when you see Greg. In fact, your body's defensive reaction when you see John is no different than when you see Betty. The explanation for this is that John's last advance towards you caused you to remember him as a bully, and in the process his memory was altered. When John began to behave in a friendly manner towards you at the moment when the record of his last incident of harassment was moved to another shelf in your memory, the original conditioned reflex that associated him with danger was modified by new experience.
In contrast, your memory of Greg as the aggressor was not activated, and so the conditioned response to him stored in your amygdala remained unchanged. Your fear response to John as a result of several friendly encounters was suppressed by increased activity in your prefrontal cortex, thereby blocking the fear-related memory in your amygdala, but your prefrontal cortex did not intervene to suppress the response of fear when meeting Greg. Research has shown that the extinction process is significantly better if the traumatic memory is first activated than if extinction therapy is used at any other time.
This kind of fictitious scenario gives an idea of the essence of the new material obtained, but what can happen in real life goes beyond the data obtained in controlled experiments, and, in addition, some other factors can mix with the existing set of them and influence on the result. An important concept is that extinction therapy works better if it is applied after the traumatic memory has been activated than if it is applied at other times. One might also add that there is a critical window of opportunity for memory to change during the short period when it undergoes reconsolidation.
“We hope that the reconsolidation window will be useful in treating patients with post-traumatic stress disorder,” says Schiller. “This will require modifications to existing therapy in order to accurately target this phase in memory.”
Yadin Dudai, a professor of neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute in Israel who was not involved in the experiment, agrees with Schiller that the new findings are a promising start to the development of new treatments in the future, but this More research will need to be done.
“In real life, PTSD is very persistent, driven by a very dense network of associations and residual impressions, or even becomes more intense over years or decades,” Dudai explains. — By the way, last week I had a conversation with a colleague who experienced trauma during a combat encounter 40 years ago. Memories of this still haunt him at night.”
People who want better therapy for anxiety disorders should welcome this new research, but it is also important not to exaggerate this new scientific understanding in terms of hopes for new therapies in the near future. “We have learned a lot from our research about how the elementary building blocks of memory are stored and updated, but we must be careful not to create premature and excessive expectations that these patterns, important as they may be, are already in place. will soon be used in treatment,” emphasizes Dudai.
However, new information about how the prefrontal cortex and amygdala function in overcoming experiential fears offers interesting insights into why some people are more susceptible to developing anxiety disorders or PTSD. These connections in the brain may be stronger in some people than in others.
