Memory Reconsolidation Understood and Misunderstood (original) (raw)
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Theory Memory Reconsolidation Understood and Misunderstood
2015
Memory reconsolidation is the brain’s natural, neural process that can produce transformational change: the full, permanent elimination of an acquired behavior or emotional response. This article identifies and examines 10 common misconceptions regarding memory reconsolidation research findings and their translation into clinical practice. The research findings are poised to drive significant advancements in both the theory and practice of psychotherapy, but these benefits depend on an accurate understanding of how memory reconsolidation functions, and misconceptions have been proliferating. This article also proposes a unified model of reconsolidation and extinction phenomena based on the brain’s well-established requirement of memory mismatch (prediction error) for reconsolidation to be triggered. A reinterpretation of numerous studies published without reference to the mismatch requirement shows how the mismatch requirement and mismatch relativity (MRMR) model can account for div...
Clinical Social Work Journal
Memory reconsolidation research by neuroscientists has demonstrated the erasure of emotional learnings. This article reviews these historic findings and how they translate directly into therapeutic application to provide the clinical field with an empirically confirmed process of transformational change. Psychotherapists’ early use of this new, transtheoretical knowledge indicates a strong potential for significant advances in both the effectiveness of psychotherapy and the unification of its many diverse systems. The erasure process consists of the creation of certain critical experiences required by the brain, and it neither dictates nor limits the experiential methods that therapists can use to facilitate the needed experiences. This article explains memory reconsolidation, delineates the empirically confirmed process, illustrates it in a case example of long-term depression, indicates the evidence supporting the hypothesis that this process is responsible for transformational ch...
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
That memory reconsolidation is the process underlying decisive, lasting therapeutic change has long been our proposal, and the recognition of its critical role by Lane et al. is a welcome development. However, in our view their account has significant errors due to neglect of research findings and neglect of previous work on the clinical application of those findings. Lane et al. provide masterful coverage of learning and memory as relevant to psychotherapy. However, we take issue with their account of memory reconsolidation. Despite their central focus on reconsolidation, and despite affirming (rightly, in our view) that "clinical change occurs through the process of memory reconsolidation" (sect. 1, para. 8), their article provides no account of (a) abundant research findings that have identified the specific process of memory reconsolidation, or (b) extensive previous development by others of the article's main themes-the use of reconsolidation for psychotherapy and for a new framework of psychotherapy integration-or of the challenge that reconsolidation poses to nonspecific common factors theory (
Memory reconsolidation (MR) has been recruited via behavioral updating procedures to achieve full annulment of a human emotional memory in over 20 studies since first reported in 2010. However, at least 14 studies have reported non-replication, the cause(s) of which have remained unclear despite extensive speculation and experimental investigation. This review examines 20 successful and 14 unsuccessful studies in detail, in an attempt to identify (a) the specific probable causes of non-replication, (b) the role of prediction error (PE), and (c) optimal clinical translation. A set of criteria is defined for principled identification of specific moments of PE and of latent cause transition in experimental procedures. Applying these criteria, a failure to induce PE is identified in every non-replication study, in most cases due to a previously overlooked element of experimental procedure. For each non-replication study, I identify a simple change of procedure that is predicted to produce PE and result in successful replication. The emerging, advanced account of PE phenomenology explains how MR produces a wide range of experimental observations, including the success of both retrieval-extinction and extinction-retrieval in driving behavioral updating.
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
Maladaptive emotional memories contribute to the persistence of many mental health disorders, and therefore the prospect of disrupting these memories to produce long-term reductions in relapse is of great clinical appeal. Reducing the impact of maladaptive emotional memories on behaviour could be achieved by two retrieval-dependent manipulations that engage separate mnemonic processes: ‘reconsolidation disruption’ and ‘extinction enhancement’. Extinction occurs during a prolonged re-exposure session in the absence of the expected emotional outcome and is widely accepted as reflecting the formation of a new, inhibitory memory that prevents behavioural expression of the original trace. Reconsolidation, by contrast, involves the destabilisation of the original memory, allowing for subsequent updating and restabilisation in specific brain regions, unless the restabilisation process is prevented through specific pharmacological or behavioural interventions. Both destabilisation of the original memory and memory extinction require that re-exposure induces prediction error – a mismatch between what is expected and what actually occurs – but the parameters that allow reconsolidation and extinction to occur, and control the transition between them, have not been well-characterised. Here we review what is known about the induction of memory destabilisation and extinction, and the transition period that separates these mnemonic processes, drawing on preclinical and clinical examples. A deeper understanding of the processes that determine the alternative routes to memory persistence or inhibition is critical for designing new and more reliable clinical treatments targeting maladaptive emotional memories.
2021
The annulment of a human emotional memory through reconsolidation behavioral updating has been documented in over twenty laboratory studies since the first such report in 2010. However, fourteen studies have reported non-replication, the cause(s) of which remain unclear. This review examines all successful and unsuccessful studies in detail, in an attempt to identify (a) the specific probable causes of non-replication and (b) how clinical translation might optimally be designed. For analyzing non-replications, a set of criteria is defined for principled identification of specific moments of prediction error (PE) in experimental procedures, including latent cause transitions, based on a preponderance of empirical evidence. A previously overlooked element of experimental procedure is in that way identified as being potentially decisive, and a unified, testable explanation is proposed for behavioral updating successes and failures in terms of the presence or absence of a PE experience....
The International Journal of Neuropsychotherapy
After 20 years of laboratory study of memory reconsolidation, the translation of research findings into clinical application has recently been the topic of a rapidly growing number of review articles. The present article identifies previously unrecognized possibilities for effective clinical translation by examining research findings from the experience-oriented viewpoint of the clinician. It is well established that destabilization of a target learning and its erasure (robust functional disappearance) by behavioral updating are experience-driven processes. By interpreting the research in terms of internal experiences required by the brain, rather than in terms of external laboratory procedures, a clinical methodology of updating and erasure unambiguously emerges, with promising properties: It is applicable for any symptom generated by emotional learning and memory, it is readily adapted to the unique target material of each therapy client, and it has extensive corroboration in existing clinical literature, including cessation of a wide range of symptoms and verification of erasure using the same markers relied upon by laboratory researchers. Two case vignettes illustrate clinical implementation and show erasure of lifelong, complex, intense emotional learnings and full, lasting cessation of major long-term symptoms. The experience-oriented framework also provides a new interpretation of the laboratory erasure procedure known as post-retrieval extinction, indicating limited clinical applicability and explaining for the first time why, even with reversal of the protocol (post-extinction retrieval), reconsolidation and erasure still occur. Also discussed are significant ramifications for the clinical field's "corrective experiences" paradigm, for psychotherapy integration, and for establishing that specific factors can produce extreme therapeutic effectiveness.
The Behavioral and brain sciences, 2014
Since Freud clinicians have understood that disturbing memories contribute to psychopathology and that new emotional experiences contribute to therapeutic change. Yet, controversy remains about what is truly essential to bring about psychotherapeutic change. Mounting evidence from empirical studies suggests that emotional arousal is a key ingredient in therapeutic change in many modalities. In addition, memory seems to play an important role but there is a lack of consensus on the role of understanding what happened in the past in bringing about therapeutic change. The core idea of this paper is that therapeutic change in a variety of modalities, including behavioral therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, emotion-focused and psychodynamic psychotherapy, results from the updating of prior emotional memories through a process of reconsolidation that incorporates new emotional experiences. The authors present an integrative memory model with three interactive components - autobiographi...
Top-down versus bottom-up perspectives on clinically significant memory reconsolidation
The Behavioral and brain sciences, 2015
Lane et al. are right: Troublesome memories can be therapeutically recontextualized. Reconsolidation of negative/traumatic memories within the context of positive/prosocial affects can facilitate diverse psychotherapies. Although neural mechanisms remain poorly understood, we discuss how nonlinear dynamics of various positive affects, heavily controlled by primal subcortical networks, may be critical for optimal benefits.