Bloodpressure medicine for erasing painful memories

http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/55455/

In 1999 a postdoc in my lab, Karim Nader, walked into my office with an idea for a new experiment. He outlined his plan to test a controversial theory in neuroscience called memory reconsolidation that contradicted what we had learned as a field about how memories were stored. The experiment he proposed seemed like such a reach that I told him not to bother doing it. As luck would have it, Nader wasn't a particularly obedient postdoc.

A month later, Nader came back into my office and said, "It worked." I looked at him surprised. "What worked?" I asked. "The reconsolidation experiment," he told me. I was amazed. Most neuroscientists, myself included, believed that a new memory, once consolidated into long-term storage, is stable. It's as if every long-term memory had its own connections in the brain. Each time you retrieve the memory, or remembered, you retrieved that original memory, and then returned it. Reconsolidation theory proposed a radically different idea—that the very act of remembering could change the memory. Therefore, every time you remembered, you'd recall the memory as it was the very last time you remembered it, rather than the memory that was created the first time. And it would be replaced as a new representation. This theory suggested that the very act of remembering might render memories fragile, subject to change or perhaps erasure. If Nader's pilot findings were correct, it might have huge implications in treatments for soldiers and other patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): Could traumatic memories be dampened or erased by simply remembering? Nader's pilot data convinced me to focus my attention and lab resources on studies of reconsolidation, and many other labs soon followed. Reconsolidation took off like wildfire.

Ideas about reconsolidation had been around since the 1960s but didn't catch on. The theory popped up again in the 1990s, but still didn't gain much traction. The reason our study grabbed everyone's attention had to do with how we did the study. Most work on this topic had used an experimental protocol that affected the whole body and brain. While the results had suggested the possibility of reconsolidation, there were always alternative explanations and questions: With the drug having such widespread actions how does one know it's affecting memory as opposed to motivation or attention or other factors? Instead, we administered the drug locally. Because we knew that the amygdala was the area in the brain that stored fear memories, we could inject a tiny amount of the drug directly into the site. If that disrupted the animal's ability to perform the task, the effect was likely due to a disruption of memory and not to the other factors. In the years that followed the publication of our paper,1 the field of reconsolidation blossomed. Hundreds of studies have been done since.

I have spent 25 years or so working out the neural basis of emotion, with a number of successes along the way. But I had never experienced anything quite like this. It wasn't that everyone accepted the idea. In fact, it is still quite controversial. It's sometimes said that the success of a scientific publication is based on how many other publications result. By that measure, reconsolidation has been a whopping success story, and one I might have easily missed.

The people who knew me as a boy would never have predicted that I would have become a neuroscientist. I grew up in Euncie, Louisiana, a typical small town that I longed to leave. My parents, however, wanted me to stay in Eunice and attend the new junior college that had just opened up there. I was resistant to the idea, so they put a deal on the table. They'd let me leave Eunice and go to college in Baton Rouge if I became a business major and came back to town to be a banker. People will say anything under duress: I told them they had a deal.