A researcher in Montreal, Canada, says he has found a way to “edit” people’s memories through psychotherapy and beta-blocker drugs to eliminate The emotional trauma of a breakup and loss of love.
Dr. Alain Brunet has spent 15 years studying post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) in people who have fought in wars or experienced terrorist attacks, as well as victims of crime.
Much of his research has focused on the development of what he calls “reconditioning therapy”. This is a revolutionary therapeutic approach that helps to remove the emotional pain of traumatic memories.
A central focus of his work has been the humble drug propranolol – a type B sympathetic nerve agent. This is a beta-sympathetic blocker that has been used for years for general conditions such as hypertension and migraines, but current research shows that it has a wider range of uses.
This memory reconsolidation treatment involves taking propranolol about an hour before psychotherapy, during which patients are then asked to write down their traumatic experiences in detail and then read them out loud.
“A lot of times when you look back on a memory, if there’s something new to learn, then that memory will unlock and then you can go and update it and then it will be re-stored and ” this Canadian clinical psychologist said to the BBC.
This process of memory reconsolidation will open a window and give you the opportunity to find the part of that memory that is highly emotionally charged and target it.
“We’re using the latest knowledge from neuroscience of how a memory is formed and how it’s unlocked, updated and then re-stored to treat patients,” Dr. Brunet says.
His work is often reminiscent of the Science Fiction movie “Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind” (also known as “Warm Inner Light”/”Ace Ventura”), in which a couple each cleans out their memories of each other. Dr. Brunet points out, however, that the memories do not disappear after reconditioning therapy, they are just no longer heartbreaking.
In human memory, those core facts are stored in the hippocampus of the brain, while the emotionally charged parts of the memory are stored in the amygdala.
“Imagine you’re shooting a movie the old-fashioned way, and your image and sound are on two separate tracks,” he says.
When a person recalls his or her traumatic experience, it is the two tracks that are re-lived again. Propranolol helps target one of these tracks – the emotional part of the memory – inhibiting its reconsolidation and suppressing its pain.
With this drug, the memory is “stored” again in the brain in a new, relatively unemotional version.
His research shows that about 70 percent of patients find relief after a few sessions of reconsolidation.
In studying this therapy, Dr. Brunet collaborated with other PTSD researchers, including Dr Roger Pitman, a PTSD expert at Harvard University.
After the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice, he ran a program in France to train about 200 doctors in the use of this therapy to help victims, witnesses, and front-line workers heal psychologically.
To date, more than 400 people in France have received this therapy in this program.
After some success in treating post-traumatic stress disorder, Dr. Brunet said he wanted to expand the use of this therapy.
In 2015, together with one of his former students at McGill University in Montreal, Michelle Lonergan, he turned to people who had been hurt and betrayed in love.
“You go to the tragedies of ancient Greece, what are they about? It’s mostly about betrayal,” he says, “and it’s really located at a central part of the human experience. “
A bad breakup can also be very distressing, he notes, and the emotional impact people feel can be similar to that of people who have experienced other major traumas.
The patients they called in to participate in the study weren’t just people who had suffered minor emotional trauma. There were cases of cheating, and some people were suddenly abandoned by partners they thought loved them.
They had a hard Time coping, Dr. Brunet said, and were the kind of people who “couldn’t turn the page, couldn’t move past it.
“These are the things that people keep telling them that don’t help, but friends know what the problem is. “
These patients are like the experience in the movie Groundhog Day – a 1993 film in which Bill Murray’s character repeats himself over and over again. The patients are the same, only they spend their days obsessing over the betrayal that caused them so much pain.
What he and Dr. Lonergan discovered was that many of these emotionally damaged people, like the PTSD patients, were relieved after memory reconsolidation therapy, and some even got better after just one session.
After five sessions, when they read their memories of betrayal out loud again, they felt, “like they were reading a novel, exactly like a story written by someone else. “
“This treatment mimics the way ordinary memory works, where we gradually forget and then turn the page,” he says.
His Montreal-based lab is currently bringing together about 60 people for a new memory reconsolidation therapy study, all of whom have been betrayed or otherwise cheated on in love relationships.
Dr. Brunet also hopes that the horizons of memory reconsolidation therapy can be expanded once again to study phobias, addictions and complex depressive mood problems, among others.
He says he hopes the therapy can be used for “any kind of distress that is triggered by an emotionally charged event.
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