Sleep Therapy Can Change Bad Memories

Mitigating fears during sleep could help to ease anxieties felt when awake
Sep 23, 2013 |By Helen Shen and ature !aga"ine

Philip Dean/Flickr Forget the psychiatrists 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 e posure therapy, which requires patients to intentionally reli!e their fears. "ith repeated e posures in the safety of a therapists consulting room, patients can learn to reduce their responses to traumatic cues # suggesting that memories are being altered. $ut the treatment itself can be intolerably painful for some patients, especially at first. %n the latest study, neuroscientist &atherina 'auner and her colleagues at the Feinberg (chool of )edicine at *orthwestern +ni!ersity in ,hicago, %llinois, de!ised a form of e posure therapy that wor-s while people snoo.e. /%ts fascinating, and !ery promising,0 says 1aniela (chiller, a neuroscientist at )ount (inai (chool of )edicine in *ew Yor-. /"e used to thin- you need awareness and conscious understanding of your emotional responses in order to change them.0

%nstant replay To create fearful memories, 'auners team deli!ered mild electric shoc-s to study participants as they !iewed pictures of faces that were paired with a distinct odor, such as lemon or mint. 2eople began to sweat slightly on seeing the pictures and smelling the odors, anticipating that they would get a shoc-. (oon after the training, participants napped in the lab while the researchers monitored their brain wa!es with electrodes placed on their scalps. "hen the !olunteers entered slow-wa!e sleep # a stage during which recent memories are replayed and reinforced # the team released one of the fear-lin-ed odors. $y administering the odor at 34-second inter!als, the researchers were trying to trigger the memory of the corresponding face o!er and o!er again # this time without deli!ering electric shoc-s. 5ust li-e when they were awa-e, the sleeping sub6ects showed increased sweating when e posed to the odor, but the effect gradually subsided. The reduced effect persisted after sleep. "hen awa-e, people showed diminished fear responses when e posed to the odor7face combination that had been triggered repeatedly during sleep. 8cti!ity changes in the amygdala, a region of the brain in!ol!ed in emotion and fear, suggest that the treatment did not erase the fearful memory, but rather that it created new, innocuous associations with the odor7face combination. 2eople who slept longer and recei!ed more treatment benefited most from the procedure. /%ts really parado ical,0 says 5an $orn, a neuroscientist at the +ni!ersity of T9bingen in :ermany, noting that the spontaneous replay of memories during sleep is typically thought to strengthen rather than wea-en learning. 'auner e plains that repeated acti!ation of a single fearful memory during sleep probably wor-s more li-e real e posure therapy and less li-e a natural replay of memories at night, in which memories are triggered hapha.ardly. )ore wor- is needed, she says, to determine how long the treatment lasts and whether o!ernight sleep might affect it. 8s for using the technique therapeutically, 'auner notes that real traumatic memories, especially !ery old ones, could be much more complicated to treat than the simple scenarios engineered in the lab. /This is a !ery no!el area,0 she says. /% thin- the process has to be refined.0