Memories aren’t immutable, recalled moments from your past just sitting on the dusty shelves of your brain. They are fluid impressions, and each time you retrieve a memory you alter it. Current research into how memory retrieval works is allowing scientists and psychologists to rethink the ways we treat past trauma in therapy, most notably in the treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. But the ways that our mind responds to exposure to past events, and subsequently translates that exposure into the imprint of a memory, is also finding application in the treatment of drug addicts (both rat and human).
A new study out in Science explores the application of reformatting an addict’s memory of drug use through showing users videos depicting drug use. Addiction therapy sometimes uses a technique called “extinction” to lessen the impact of drug paraphernalia on recovering addicts. During extinction heroin addicts, for example, are shown drug-related imagery while they’re sober. It’s thought that by viewing syringes over and over, but not subsequently shooting up, the addicts will stop closely associating the two.
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While extinction techniques have been used in the past to success, the researchers in this study further refined its application and achieved better results. The researchers gave cocaine and heroin addicted rats a short memory retrieval session by playing a light and sou nd cue, one that they had been conditioned to associate with getting high. This short retrieval session was done ten minutes, one hour, or six hours before exposing the rats to a longer, more typical extinction session. The rats that were exposed only ten minutes or one hour before their extinction session were less likely to use drugs again, while those exposed six hours before their extinction session remained addicts.
Similar results were found using human subjects. Heroin addicts were either exposed to videos of neutral scenes or heroin use prior to extinction sessions. Again, those who were given a memory retrieval session ten minutes prior to extinction fared better than those shown neutral scenes or those who were exposed to the memory retrieval six hours before extinction. The addicts given memory retrieval ten minutes prior to extinction experienced fewer cravings across the six-month period of the study.
The results of this study are a bit curious because the tactic employed isn’t simply desensitizing addicts to drug use. If that was the case, all addicts ought to have fared about the same. It seems that by forcing addicts to access a memory of drug use, then quickly following that retrieval with a longer exposure, the drug memories lost some of their power to induce cravings. That’s not because the memories lost power, but because researchers were able to actually augment the memories themselves
