Not-so total recall
Once a memory is formed, it's there to stay. Or is it? 
Appeared in New Scientist Magazine.
Appeared in New Scientist Magazine.
Clear your mindNeuroscientists' eyes light up at the thought that the memory reconsolidation effect could yield the perfect treatment for trauma, phobias, psychosis and anxiety. Vividly relive what bothers you, pop a pill, and the next day the unhappy memory or obsessive thought will be gone. It sounds far-fetched, except that there's a strange precedent. Back in the 1960s, researchers noticed that the electroconvulsive shock treatment given to conscious human psychiatric patients could produce amnesia for any recently recalled memories, but not memories left dormant. In effect, reconsolidation had already been shown in people. In the 1970s, Canadian psychiatrist Richard Rubin claimed remarkable success at turning this effect to his patients' benefit when he asked them to focus on their obsessions before the shocks. He reported that their troublesome thoughts were weakened or erased. One woman who was in hospital because of a compulsion to stab her mother with a butcher's knife was able to return home the next day and "spoke kindly to her mother for the first time in years". The woman had already been shocked 22 times under anaesthetic without effect. Rubin showed that the thoughts were only affected if consciously roused. Modern memory researchers like McGill University's Karim Nader don't know quite how to take such claims. Nader says the reconsolidation findings make them plausible, but it's hardly possible to use shock treatment on conscious patients these days. However, he says, memory researchers have high hopes that targeted drug treatments may have exactly the same effect.
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May 3, 2003.
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