14 DAY TRIAL // A new paper published in the journal Nature Neuroscience argues that it might be possible to treat phobias, post-traumatic stress disorders and other similar psychiatric disorders by means of sleep therapy.
Specifically, researchers at the Northwestern University in Chicago maintain that, according to their investigations into the matter at hand, it is possible to train a person's brain into getting rid of or at least gaining control over bad memories.
What's more, such “training sessions” can take place while the individual is sound asleep.
To test the theory that sleep therapy can help people overcome their bad memories, the researchers have carried out a series of experiments.
Thus, they first delivered mild electric shocks to volunteers while the latter were busy looking at pictures of faces and sniffing odors such as lemon or mint that were associated with the images.
As was to be expected, the volunteers soon learned to expect being shocked whenever they saw one of the pictures used in these experiments and whenever they smelled one of said odors.
More often than not, this anticipation triggered sweating, Nature tells us.
The volunteers were then asked to take a nap. While they were sleeping, the researchers exposed them to the odors they had learned to associate with getting shocked once every 30 seconds and closely monitored their brain activity.
At first, the volunteers responded to the odors, linked them to the pictures of faces and started sweating, as if expecting to be shocked. However, because this did not happen, they soon lost this fear.
When they woke up and they were once again exposed to the pictures and the odors, they managed to keep their cool. Researchers suspect this happened because the sleep therapy had forced them to overwrite new memories over the old, fearful ones.
“In human subjects who underwent olfactory contextual fear conditioning, re-exposure to the odorant context in slow-wave sleep promoted stimulus-specific fear extinction, with parallel reductions of hippocampal activity and reorganization of amygdala ensemble patterns.”
“Thus, fear extinction may be selectively enhanced during sleep, even without re-exposure to the feared stimulus itself,” the researchers write in the Abstract to their paper.
Specialists now wish to carry out further investigations and determine how long the beneficial effects of sleep therapy work, and whether or not sleep therapy could serve to rid people of really traumatic memories that are also fairly old.
“It’s fascinating, and very promising. We used to think you need awareness and conscious understanding of your emotional responses in order to change them,” said neuroscientist Daniela Schiller with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.