Sentences with phrase «fearful memories»
"Fearful memories" refers to past experiences that were scary or caused fear. Full definition
The volunteers formed fearful memories of both the smell and faces, as measured by their increased sweat.
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«These drugs, together with alcohol, may affect the ability to let go of fearful memories in different ways.»
Specifically, the findings explain how a particular gene — called fkbp5 — is involved in a phenomenon known as «fear extinction,» through which animals and humans disassociate with fearful memories of a traumatic experience, such as war, assault or a natural disaster.
The research, described at a news briefing during the 2017 AAAS Annual Meeting, suggests, in principle, that scientists may someday be able to erase fearful memories associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or disordered memories associated with drug use.
«Alcohol prevents ability to extinguish fearful memories in mice: Insight into cellular mechanisms illuminates biological target for PTSD therapy.»
In 2010, Phelps and her colleagues showed that memory reconsolidation could be used to extinguish fearful memories [2].
«It's very interesting work but not practical for clinical treatment of patients,» says Denis Paré, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey who is also studying pharmacological approaches to manipulating fearful memories.
Some scientists might explore how and why the neural circuits that detect threats and store fearful memories sometimes behave in unusual ways after traumatic events — the kinds of changes that are partially responsible for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Based on past studies from several animal researchers, the Johns Hopkins team knew that extinguishing fearful memories requires receptors for the neurotransmitter glutamate.
Mice, for example, can inherit fearful memories from their parents through changes in how their genes are expressed, without any changes to the DNA itself.
The group, led by cognitive neuroscientist Katherina Hauner, first created fearful memories in 15 volunteers.
Helping people with fearful memories using this technique will be challenging, but it's worth doing if it could make exposure therapy faster and more tolerable, says Hauner.
«If dexamethasone works well in humans, we could potentially use it to prevent fearful memories in soldiers on the battlefield, patients in emergency rooms, or anywhere else where healthcare providers provide treatment within hours of traumatic events.»
Pointing to the change in amygdala activity, which is central to the brain's system of storing and recalling fearful memories (see How Fear Works to learn about this process), the researchers say the memory was not simply disconnected from fear, but that it was actually erased in its entirety.
The researchers are even studying the role of BLA neurons in fear extinction, which is the process of rewriting fearful memories so that they are associated with more positive ones.
«Turning down the brain to erase fearful memories: Weakening communication between two parts of the brain in mice reduced their fear levels.»
I just have a lot of FEARFUL memories.
This triggered reconsolidation, which interfered with and weakened the fearful memories.
«Extinction of fearful memories and extinction of drug - seeking memories relies on the same substrate in the brain.
How could a fearful memory of a smell wheedle its way into eggs and sperm and change the behaviour of future generations?
This is why therapists seek a possibility for «overwriting» the fearful memory in a faster and longer - lasting way.
Although it isn't entirely clear what these results mean, the researchers speculate that each time a fearful memory is revived, it again enters a labile state, and protein synthesis is necessary to «reconsolidate» it.
They found that dexamethasone, a widely prescribed steroid for inflammatory conditions, affects the expression of fkbp5 in the brain, preventing the formation of the fearful memories that are the hallmark of PTSD.
The mice were unable to dredge up the fearful memory, which meant that the subiculum was needed for recall.
They herded each mouse into a special cage and delivered a mild electric shock to its foot, leading the mouse to form a fearful memory of the cage.
Now, in a study published online by the journal Nature Neuroscience, researchers from Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science say that by weakening the communication between neurons in two parts of a mouse's brain, they've been able to erase a fearful memory.
But the researchers also found that by subjecting the pathway to repeated pulses of light, they could weaken the connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex — apparently destabilizing and perhaps destroying the fearful memory.
For example, if it was raining at the time a child was in a car accident, a child might connect rain with the fearful memories of the car accident.
A significant emphasis is on the biology of fearful memory, which we dissect using Pavlovian conditioning paradigms.