A Potential New Area for PTSD Research
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a common form of fear memory, in which a pervasive emotional stress is created by remembering experiences that evoked fear. If our brains could forget the fear memory, PTSD would decay away. Why can't we forget fear memories? In part, it is because they keep getting rehearsed, and much of this rehearsal occurs during our dreams. One major normal function of sleep is to help the brain to strengthen memory of things, good and bad, that happened during wakefulness. Recent animal research suggests how the brain accomplishes this memory strengthening (called consolidation). More importantly, consolidation is manipulable. The study began with the established understanding that memories are of two kinds: explicit (episodic) and implicit (procedural). Fear memories are episodic; that is, we remember the episodes in our life that were traumatic. Episodic memories are laid down by a structure in the brain known as the hippocampus, a part of the cerebr...