Can we edit memories Amy Milton
Transcriber: Joseph Geni
Reviewer: Camille Martínez
Memory is such an everyday thing
that we almost take it for granted.
We all remember what we had
for breakfast this morning
or what we did last weekend.
It’s only when memory starts to fail
that we appreciate just how amazing it is
and how much we allow
our past experiences to define us.
But memory is not always a good thing.
As the American poet and clergyman
John Lancaster Spalding once said,
“As memory may be a paradise
from which we cannot be driven,
it may also be a hell
from which we cannot escape.”
Many of us experience
chapters of our lives
that we would prefer
to never have happened.
It is estimated that
nearly 90 percent of us
will experience some sort of
traumatic event during our lifetimes.
Many of us will suffer acutely
following these events and then recover,
maybe even become better people
because of those experiences.
But some events
are so extreme that many –
up to half of those who survive
sexual violence, for example –
will go on to develop
post-traumatic stress disorder,
or PTSD.
PTSD is a debilitating
mental health condition
characterized by symptoms
such as intense fear and anxiety
and flashbacks of the traumatic event.
These symptoms have a huge impact
on a person’s quality of life
and are often triggered
by particular situations
or cues in that person’s environment.
The responses to those cues may have been
adaptive when they were first learned –
fear and diving for cover
in a war zone, for example –
but in PTSD,
they continue to control behavior
when it’s no longer appropriate.
If a combat veteran returns home
and is diving for cover
when he or she hears a car backfiring
or can’t leave their own home
because of intense anxiety,
then the responses
to those cues, those memories,
have become what we would
refer to as maladaptive.
In this way, we can think of PTSD
as being a disorder of maladaptive memory.
Now, I should stop myself here,
because I’m talking about memory
as if it’s a single thing.
It isn’t.
There are many different types of memory,
and these depend upon different circuits
and regions within the brain.
As you can see, there are two
major distinctions in our types of memory.
There are those memories
that we’re consciously aware of,
where we know we know
and that we can pass on in words.
This would include memories
for facts and events.
Because we can declare these memories,
we refer to these as declarative memories.
The other type of memory
is non-declarative.
These are memories where we often
don’t have conscious access
to the content of those memories
and that we can’t pass on in words.
The classic example
of a non-declarative memory
is the motor skill for riding a bike.
Now, this being Cambridge,
the odds are that you can ride a bike.
You know what you’re doing on two wheels.
But if I asked you to write me
a list of instructions
that would teach me how to ride a bike,
as my four-year-old son did
when we bought him a bike
for his last birthday,
you would really struggle to do that.
How should you sit on the bike
so you’re balanced?
How fast do you need to pedal
so you’re stable?
If a gust of wind comes at you,
which muscles should you tense
and by how much
so that you don’t get blown off?
I’ll be staggered if you can give
the answers to those questions.
But if you can ride a bike,
you do have the answers,
you’re just not consciously aware of them.
Getting back to PTSD,
another type of non-declarative memory
is emotional memory.
Now, this has a specific
meaning in psychology
and refers to our ability
to learn about cues in our environment
and their emotional
and motivational significance.
What do I mean by that?
Well, think of a cue
like the smell of baking bread,
or a more abstract cue
like a 20-pound note.
Because these cues have been pegged
with good things in the past,
we like them and we approach them.
Other cues, like the buzzing of a wasp,
elicit very negative emotions
and quite dramatic
avoidance behavior in some people.
Now, I hate wasps.
I can tell you that fact.
But what I can’t give you
are the non-declarative emotional memories
for how I react
when there’s a wasp nearby.
I can’t give you the racing heart,
the sweaty palms,
that sense of rising panic.
I can describe them to you,
but I can’t give them to you.
Now, importantly,
from the perspective of PTSD,
stress has very different effects on
declarative and non-declarative memories
and the brain circuits
and regions supporting them.
Emotional memory is supported
by a small almond-shaped structure
called the amygdala
and its connections.
Declarative memory, especially the what,
where and when of event memory,
is supported by a seahorse-shaped
region of the brain
called the hippocampus.
The extreme levels of stress
experienced during trauma
have very different effects
on these two structures.
As you can see, as you increase
a person’s level of stress
from not stressful to slightly stressful,
the hippocampus,
acting to support the event memory,
increases in its activity
and works better to support
the storage of that declarative memory.
But as you increase to moderately
stressful, intensely stressful
and then extremely stressful,
as would be found in trauma,
the hippocampus
effectively shuts down.
This means that under
the high levels of stress hormones
that are experienced
during trauma,
we are not storing the details,
the specific details
of what, where and when.
Now, while stress is doing that
to the hippocampus,
look at what it does to the amygdala,
that structure important
for the emotional, non-declarative memory.
Its activity gets stronger and stronger.
So what this leaves
us with in PTSD
is an overly strong emotional –
in this case fear – memory
that is not tied
to a specific time or place,
because the hippocampus
is not storing what, where and when.
In this way, these cues
can control behavior
when it’s no longer appropriate,
and that’s how
they become maladaptive.
So if we know that PTSD
is due to maladaptive memories,
can we use that knowledge
to improve treatment outcomes
for patients with PTSD?
A radical new approach being developed
to treat post-traumatic stress disorder
aims to destroy those maladaptive
emotional memories
that underlie the disorder.
This approach has only
been considered a possibility
because of the profound changes
in our understanding of memory
in recent years.
Traditionally, it was thought
that making a memory
was like writing in a notebook in pen:
once the ink had dried,
you couldn’t change the information.
It was thought that all
those structural changes
that happen in the brain
to support the storage of memory
were finished within about six hours,
and after that, they were permanent.
This is known as the consolidation view.
However, more recent research suggests
that making a memory
is actually more like writing
in a word processor.
We initially make the memory
and then we save it or store it.
But under the right conditions,
we can edit that memory.
This reconsolidation view suggests
that those structural changes
that happen in the brain to support memory
can be undone,
even for old memories.
Now, this editing process
isn’t happening all the time.
It only happens under
very specific conditions
of memory retrieval.
So let’s consider memory retrieval
as being recalling the memory
or, like, opening the file.
Quite often, we are simply
retrieving the memory.
We’re opening the file as read-only.
But under the right conditions,
we can open that file in edit mode,
and then we can change the information.
In theory, we could delete
the content of that file,
and when we press save,
that is how the file – the memory –
persists.
Not only does this reconsolidation view
allow us to account for some
of the quirks of memory,
like how we all sometimes
misremember the past,
it also gives us a way to destroy
those maladaptive fear memories
that underlie PTSD.
All we would need would be two things:
a way of making the memory unstable –
opening that file in edit mode –
and a way to delete the information.
We’ve made the most progress
with working out
how to delete the information.
It was found fairly early on
that a drug widely prescribed
to control blood pressure in humans –
a beta-blocker
called Propranolol –
could be used to prevent
the reconsolidation
of fear memories in rats.
If Propranolol was given
while the memory was in edit mode,
rats behaved as if they were no longer
afraid of a frightening trigger cue.
It was as if they had never learned
to be afraid of that cue.
And this was with a drug
that was safe for use in humans.
Now, not long after that,
it was shown that Propranolol could
destroy fear memories in humans as well,
but critically, it only works
if the memory is in edit mode.
Now, that study was with
healthy human volunteers,
but it’s important because it shows
that the rat findings
can be extended to humans
and ultimately, to human patients.
And with humans,
you can test whether destroying
the non-declarative emotional memory
does anything to
the declarative event memory.
And this is really interesting.
Even though people
who were given Propranolol
while the memory was in edit mode
were no longer afraid
of that frightening trigger cue,
they could still describe the relationship
between the cue
and the frightening outcome.
It was as if they knew
they should be afraid,
and yet they weren’t.
This suggests that Propranolol
can selectively target
the non-declarative emotional memory
but leave the declarative
event memory intact.
But critically, Propranolol can only have
any effect on the memory
if it’s in edit mode.
So how do we make a memory unstable?
How do we get it into edit mode?
Well, my own lab has done
quite a lot of work on this.
We know that it depends on introducing
some but not too much new information
to be incorporated into the memory.
We know about the different
chemicals the brain uses
to signal that a memory
should be updated
and the file edited.
Now, our work is mostly in rats,
but other labs have found the same factors
allow memories to be edited in humans,
even maladaptive memories
like those underlying PTSD.
In fact, a number of labs
in several different countries
have begun small-scale clinical trials
of these memory-destroying treatments
for PTSD
and have found really promising results.
Now, these studies need replication
on a larger scale,
but they show the promise
of these memory-destroying treatments
for PTSD.
Maybe trauma memories do not need to be
the hell from which we cannot escape.
Now, although this memory-destroying
approach holds great promise,
that’s not to say
that it’s straightforward
or without controversy.
Is it ethical to destroy memories?
What about things
like eyewitness testimony?
What if you can’t give someone Propranolol
because it would interfere
with other medicines that they’re taking?
Well, with respect to ethics
and eyewitness testimony,
I would say the important
point to remember
is the finding from that human study.
Because Propranolol is only acting
on the non-declarative emotional memory,
it seems unlikely that it would affect
eyewitness testimony,
which is based on declarative memory.
Essentially, what these
memory-destroying treatments
are aiming to do
is to reduce the emotional memory,
not get rid of the trauma
memory altogether.
This should make the responses
of those with PTSD
more like those who have
been through trauma
and not developed PTSD
than people who have never
experienced trauma in the first place.
I think that most people would find that
more ethically acceptable
than a treatment that aimed
to create some sort of spotless mind.
What about Propranolol?
You can’t give Propranolol to everyone,
and not everyone wants to take drugs
to treat mental health conditions.
Well, here Tetris could be useful.
Yes, Tetris.
Working with clinical collaborators,
we’ve been looking at whether
behavioral interventions
can also interfere with
the reconsolidation of memories.
Now, how would that work?
Well, we know that
it’s basically impossible
to do two tasks at the same time
if they both depend on
the same brain region for processing.
Think trying to sing along to the radio
while you’re trying to compose an email.
The processing for one
interferes with the other.
Well, it’s the same when
you retrieve a memory,
especially in edit mode.
If we take a highly visual symptom
like flashbacks in PTSD
and get people to recall
the memory in edit mode
and then get them to do
a highly engaging visual task
like playing Tetris,
it should be possible to introduce
so much interfering information
into that memory
that it essentially becomes meaningless.
That’s the theory,
and it’s supported by data
from healthy human volunteers.
Now, our volunteers watched
highly unpleasant films –
so, think eye surgery,
road traffic safety adverts,
Scorsese’s “The Big Shave.”
These trauma films produce
something like flashbacks
in healthy volunteers
for about a week after viewing them.
We found that getting people
to recall those memories,
the worst moments
of those unpleasant films,
and playing Tetris at the same time,
massively reduced the frequency
of the flashbacks.
And again: the memory had to be
in edit mode for that to work.
Now, my collaborators have since
taken this to clinical populations.
They’ve tested this in survivors
of road traffic accidents
and mothers who’ve had
emergency Caesarean sections,
both types of trauma
that frequently lead to PTSD,
and they found really promising
reductions in symptoms
in both of those clinical cases.
So although there is still much to learn
and procedures to optimize,
these memory-destroying treatments
hold great promise
for the treatment
of mental health disorders
like PTSD.
Maybe trauma memories do not need
to be a hell from which we cannot escape.
I believe that this approach
should allow those who want to
to turn the page
on chapters of their lives
that they would prefer
to never have experienced,
and so improve our mental health.
Thank you.
(Applause)