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While the body is asleep, the brain is busy processing daytime activity, turning it into memories that can be come back in the future. Previous scientific experiments have shown that a dream allows you to better remember the disturbing moments of the past, and the new the study showed that what a dream gives is what it takes frightening memories can be erased by reshaping them into a dream.
Studies of neurophysiologists from a medical school Northwestern University showed that frightening memories, triggered by a specific odor can be significantly weakened if you re-expose participants to this same smell while they are sleeping. Researchers Programmed the reaction of fear in the participants of the experiment using mild electrical discharges. During these ranks, volunteers saw two different faces and smelled of two different smells associated with each of them.
Then they fell asleep, and in the slow phase of sleep they were exposed exposure to one of the odors associated with electric shocks. Waking up, the participants in the experiment showed less reaction. fear on the face associated precisely with the smell that they felt in a dream. According to the researchers, it is likely that further development of this technology will allow treating serious phobias.
This is not the first attempt in the world to erase bad memories. Last fall, during an experiment at Stanford, scientists were able to chemically erase frightening memories from sleeping mice. And just last week, a team of researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Institute Whitehead Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, identified the Tet1 gene as critical for killing memories.
According to scientists at Northwestern University, this is the first case of successful manipulation of emotional memories in sleeping people, although it was carried out on a small scale – with only 15 volunteers. Details of this study have been published. online in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
Time
