A strange way to forget bad memories

A strange way to forget bad memories

A new study has revealed that playing sounds for people while they sleep can be used to help them forget certain memories. According to Neuroscience News, University of York researchers say early stage detection could be developed into techniques to help weaken painful and intrusive memories.

Forget about trauma

Research has previously found that turning on 'audio cues' during sleep can be used to reinforce certain memories, but the latest study provides the first strong evidence that this technology can also be used to help people forget.
The ability to recall specific memories by playing audio cues when an individual is asleep could be used to treat people who have experienced trauma, said the study's first researcher, Dr. Bradur Joensen, a former doctoral student in the Department of Psychology at the University of York. A wide range of distressing symptoms due to their memories of those events. Although the road is still a long way off, the new discovery could pave the way for new techniques to impair those memories that can be used in conjunction with existing treatments.”

overlapping words

Twenty-nine adult volunteers participated in the study who were taught associations between pairs of overlapping words such as hammer and desk. The participants then slept through the night in the York University sleep lab. The research team analyzed the participants' brain waves and when they reached the stage of deep or slow wave sleep (also known as stage three sleep), they quietly played a sound repeating the word hammer.
Previous research has found that learning a pair of words and playing a sound associated with that pair during sleep improves participants' memory for the word pair when they wake up in the morning.

selective forgetting

However, when overlapping words were given in this clinical trial, there was an increase in the memory of one pair of words and a decrease in the memory of the other pair of words, suggesting that it is possible to cause selective forgetting by playing associated sounds during sleep.
According to the researchers, sleep played an important role in the effects they observed in their study, with lead researcher Dr Aidan Horner from the Department of Psychology at York University saying: 'The relationship between sleep and memory is fascinating. We know that sleep is critical to memory processing, and our memory is usually better after a period of sleep. The exact mechanisms used in play remain unclear, but during sleep it appears that important connections are strengthened and unimportant ones are ignored.”

manipulation of memories

The new research findings suggest that memory activation and inhibition can be manipulated so that sleep can be used to help weaken painful memories. The same technique can be used to weaken current memories in the real world.”