Traumatic memories
Traumatic memories can cause life problems even to individuals who do not meet the diagnostic criteria for a mental health disorder.
They result from traumatic experiences, including natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis; violent events such as kidnapping, terrorist attacks, war, domestic abuse and rape.
The ability to erase specific traumatic memories, even if possible, would create additional problems and so would not necessarily benefit the individual.
These children suffer academically and socially due to symptoms like fragmentation of memory, intrusive thoughts, dissociation and flashbacks, all of which may be related to hippocampal dysfunction.
[1] If symptoms of apathy, feeling of inability to control impulsive behavior, sleeplessness or irritability persist the person can discuss this with their family doctor or a psychotherapist.
[6] Traumatic memories are formed after an experience that causes high levels of emotional arousal and the activation of stress hormones.
Increased release of Norepinephrine inhibits the prefrontal cortex, which plays a role in emotion control as well as extinction or suppression of memory.
"[9] There are some serious ethical problems with this process as the reactivation of traumatic memories can be very harmful and in some cases cause anxiety attacks and extreme levels of stress.
The amygdala is an important brain structure when it comes to learning fearful responses, in other words, it influences how people remember traumatic things.
An increase in blood flow to this area has been shown when people look at scary faces, or remember traumatic events.
[12] Research has also shown that the lateral nucleus of the amygdala is a crucial site of neural changes that occur during fear conditioning.
[20] Propranolol is a blocker for the beta-adrenergic receptors in the amygdala which usually are bound to by stress hormones released by the adrenal gland- epinephrine and norepinephrine.
Research exploring the idea that blocking these receptors would disrupt the creation of proteins necessary for consolidating fearful memories in the amygdala.
The antagonizing of a subtype of receptor for Neuropeptide Y caused the opposite effects- it decreased the likelihood that a fearful memory would be forgotten.
[24] Exposure therapy involves gradually exposing individuals to a stimuli they find disturbing or fear inducing until it no longer provokes an emotional response.
Evidence has been found linking early traumatic experiences with agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder where individuals fear having panic attacks outdoors.
By systematically targeting distressing memories and stimuli, with exposure therapy, it has been shown levels of depression and symptoms of PTSD decrease significantly.
[28] Research has shown several cognitive behavioural therapies to be effective methods of reducing the emotional distress and negative thought patterns associated with traumatic memories in both those suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder and depression.
The change in evaluation usually involves highlighting that the feelings of certain death, extreme danger, hopelessness and helplessness within a traumatic memory do not apply to the person now, as they survived the event.
Extending them to a point where the person felt safe again, so they remember the event in a more complete way with less focus on the negative aspects.
[31][33] Skin conductance responses, a measure of stress and arousal, have also shown lower levels when negative memories treated with EMDR were brought to mind.
[33] Emily Holmes at the University of Oxford ran an experiment that showed the video game Tetris could be a potential method of reducing the strength of traumatic memories.
Compared with a control group the participants who played Tetris experienced far less intrusive and upsetting thoughts about the footage over a week-long period.
[35] Holmes and colleagues proposed that because of this visuospatial distractors like Tetris, if administered within six hours of a traumatic event could help prevent symptoms of flashbacks.
For example, if a traumatic memory were erased, a person might still remember related events in their lives, such as their emotional reactions to later experiences.
Without the original memory to give them context, these remembered events might prompt the subjects to see themselves as emotional or irrational people.
[37][38] The report discourages the use of drugs that blunt the effect of traumatic memories, warning against treating human emotional reactions to life events as a medical issue.
[36] Despite potential risks and abuses, it can still be justifiable to erase traumatic memories when their presence is so disruptive to some and overcoming them can be a difficult process.
