“…Full, lasting unlearning and nullification is what extinction studies had never achieved. Numerous subsequent studies with both animal and human subjects demonstrated the same strong effect-the unlearning and elimination of a feargenerating threat memory response via behavioral updating (reviewed by, for example, Bellfy & Kwapis, 2020;Clem & Schiller, 2016;Lee et al, 2017;Silva & Gräff, 2023). To date, there have been at least 20 such human studies (with full details of each study reviewed by Ecker, 2021).…”
A person’s “memory” is the stored form of all types of acquired personal knowledge, including both knowledge of personal experiences (episodic memory) and knowledge of patterns perceived in the world (semantic memory), such as the knowledge that staying safe around one’s rage-prone, alcoholic parent urgently requires never expressing any views or feelings of one’s own. This article explores the possibility of (a) understanding most, if not all, psychotherapeutic action as a reconfiguration of knowledge held in memory and (b) identifying each of the distinct, fundamentally different endogenous mechanisms, or types of processes, that can modify memory therapeutically. In this way, a potential means of unifying psychotherapy emerges, enabling us to identify how any particular therapeutic process influences symptom production through its memory modification effects. Memory neuroscience has identified mechanisms of memory modification sufficiently for the proposed explorations to be pursued fruitfully at this point. The resulting unification scheme consists of two qualitatively different, main modes of memory modification, each with submodes. This scheme can account for the full range of therapeutic outcomes, from partial, unstable, relapse-prone symptom reduction to transformational change, defined here as the enduring cessation of a symptom and its underlying theme of emotional distress. Case vignettes illustrate the fundamental modes and some submodes of therapeutic memory modification. Viewed through this unification framework, diverse therapy systems no longer seem to belong to different worlds. Rather, their distinctive techniques and methodologies become a rich array of options for tailoring memory modification and therapeutic change uniquely for each person.
“…Full, lasting unlearning and nullification is what extinction studies had never achieved. Numerous subsequent studies with both animal and human subjects demonstrated the same strong effect-the unlearning and elimination of a feargenerating threat memory response via behavioral updating (reviewed by, for example, Bellfy & Kwapis, 2020;Clem & Schiller, 2016;Lee et al, 2017;Silva & Gräff, 2023). To date, there have been at least 20 such human studies (with full details of each study reviewed by Ecker, 2021).…”
A person’s “memory” is the stored form of all types of acquired personal knowledge, including both knowledge of personal experiences (episodic memory) and knowledge of patterns perceived in the world (semantic memory), such as the knowledge that staying safe around one’s rage-prone, alcoholic parent urgently requires never expressing any views or feelings of one’s own. This article explores the possibility of (a) understanding most, if not all, psychotherapeutic action as a reconfiguration of knowledge held in memory and (b) identifying each of the distinct, fundamentally different endogenous mechanisms, or types of processes, that can modify memory therapeutically. In this way, a potential means of unifying psychotherapy emerges, enabling us to identify how any particular therapeutic process influences symptom production through its memory modification effects. Memory neuroscience has identified mechanisms of memory modification sufficiently for the proposed explorations to be pursued fruitfully at this point. The resulting unification scheme consists of two qualitatively different, main modes of memory modification, each with submodes. This scheme can account for the full range of therapeutic outcomes, from partial, unstable, relapse-prone symptom reduction to transformational change, defined here as the enduring cessation of a symptom and its underlying theme of emotional distress. Case vignettes illustrate the fundamental modes and some submodes of therapeutic memory modification. Viewed through this unification framework, diverse therapy systems no longer seem to belong to different worlds. Rather, their distinctive techniques and methodologies become a rich array of options for tailoring memory modification and therapeutic change uniquely for each person.
“…In the engram view, such fear attenuation caused by the retrieval-extinction procedure occurs through updating the original fear trace toward safety by increasing overlap between fear and extinction engram neurons, ultimately erasing fear memory [ 117 ]. This fear attenuation can also be observed in the remote fear memory scenario [ 118 ], but the attenuation of remote fear memory depends on a specific thalamo-amygdalar circuit [ 119 , 120 ]. Fig.…”
Section: Reinforcing Extinction Memory: Deconstruction Of Fear Memory...mentioning
Fear extinction is a biological process in which learned fear behavior diminishes without anticipated reinforcement, allowing the organism to re-adapt to ever-changing situations. Based on the behavioral hypothesis that extinction is new learning and forms an extinction memory, this new memory is more readily forgettable than the original fear memory. The brain’s cellular and synaptic traces underpinning this inherently fragile yet reinforceable extinction memory remain unclear. Intriguing questions are about the whereabouts of the engram neurons that emerged during extinction learning and how they constitute a dynamically evolving functional construct that works in concert to store and express the extinction memory. In this review, we discuss recent advances in the engram circuits and their neural connectivity plasticity for fear extinction, aiming to establish a conceptual framework for understanding the dynamic competition between fear and extinction memories in adaptive control of conditioned fear responses.
“…Recent evidence has additionally shed light on the dynamic nature of memories, revealing that memories behave as dynamic constructs that change over time and with experience. Their properties, such as specificity, accessibility, or susceptibility to disruption, evolve after encoding, and their content can be updated upon changes in external or internal contingencies (25,(31)(32)(33)(34)(35)(36)(37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42). Likewise, activity patterns in brain areas where memory ensembles are established upon learning, like the hippocampus, evolve over time and experience (2,14,27,(43)(44)(45)(46)(47)(48)(49).…”
Memories are dynamic constructs whose properties change with time and experience. The biological mechanisms underpinning these dynamics remain elusive, particularly concerning how shifts in the composition of memory-encoding neuronal ensembles influence a memory properties’ evolution over time. By leveraging a developmental approach to target distinct subpopulations of principal neurons, we show that memory encoding results in the concurrent establishment of multiple memory traces in the mouse hippocampus. Two of these traces are instantiated in subpopulations of early- and late-born neurons and follow distinct reactivation trajectories post-encoding. Notably, the divergent recruitment of these subpopulations underpins memory ensembles’ gradual reorganization, and modulates memory persistence and plasticity across multiple learning episodes. Thus, our findings reveal profound and intricate relationships between ensemble dynamics and memories’ progression over time.
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