{"id":79646,"date":"2018-06-15T08:23:45","date_gmt":"2018-06-15T15:23:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/traumatic-memory-study-reveals-how-our-darkest-fears-can-be-rewritten"},"modified":"2018-06-19T15:04:25","modified_gmt":"2018-06-19T22:04:25","slug":"traumatic-memory-study-reveals-how-our-darkest-fears-can-be-rewritten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/traumatic-memory-study-reveals-how-our-darkest-fears-can-be-rewritten","title":{"rendered":"Traumatic Memory Study Reveals How Our Darkest Fears Can Be Rewritten"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/traumatic-memory-study-reveals-how-our-darkest-fears-can-be-rewritten2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Deep-seated fears, like the memory of a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/topic\/death\">death<\/a> or war-time trauma, can be crippling. They\u2019re also notoriously hard to study and treat, says neuroscientist Ossama Khalaf, Ph.D. But finally, we\u2019re making progress: In a <em>Science<\/em> paper published Thursday, Khalaf and his team show new evidence suggesting that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/article\/37657-amygdala-brain-fear-aversive-learning\">fearful memories<\/a> that dwell deep in the brain\u2019s neural circuitry don\u2019t have to be a burden forever. It\u2019s possible, the paper suggests, that they can be rewired.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/science.sciencemag.org\/content\/360\/6394\/1239.full\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">paper<\/a> is rooted in the science of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/article\/44838-rna-long-term-epigenetic-memory\">engrams<\/a> \u2014 the idea that memories leave a physical trace in the brain. In this case, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.researchgate.net\/profile\/Ossama_Khalaf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Khalaf<\/a>, a researcher at \u00c9cole Polytechnique F\u00e9d\u00e9rale de Lausanne, and his team traced deep-seated fear memories in rats back to the activity of specific neurons. They found that the <em>way<\/em> those neurons fire \u2014 and thus the fearful memory they encode \u2014 can be reprogrammed.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn our study, we are providing the first experimental evidence that fear memory attenuation is mediated by the re-engagement of the original fear re-writing it towards safety,\u201d Khalaf tells <em>Inverse<\/em> via email.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/article\/45998-rewiring-fear-memories\">https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/article\/45998-rewiring-fear-memories<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Deep-seated fears, like the memory of a death or war-time trauma, can be crippling. They\u2019re also notoriously hard to study and treat, says neuroscientist Ossama Khalaf, Ph.D. But finally, we\u2019re making progress: In a Science paper published Thursday, Khalaf and his team show new evidence suggesting that fearful memories that dwell deep in the brain\u2019s [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79646"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79813,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79646\/revisions\/79813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}