Living with a phobia can be extremely debilitating, but
sometimes treatment can seem even more daunting. One of the most common methods
for treating a phobia is exposure therapy, in which the patient is forced to
face their fear over and over again. Eventually the patient begins to learn
that whatever it was they were afraid of isn't so scary after all and their
reaction gradually lessens. Unfortunately, this process is extremely stressful
and frightening as this method actually requires that the patients to come face
to face with the very things they fear.
Some patients would rather not go into therapy at all.
Luckily, scientists at the Feinberg School of Medicine in
Chicago may have come up with an easier solution: sleep. In this study,
subjects were shown a series of faces while smells like mint or lemon were
pumped throughout the room. When they came in contact with a particular face,
subjects received a small but painful electric shock. Before long, the very
sight of a particular face was enough to stress people out, even if no shock
was delivered, thus simulating a phobia. Not long after the conditioning
process, the subjects were hooked up to electrodes and asked to take a nap.
Just as they entered slow-wave sleep, the stage where the brain begins to process
memories, the smell of mint was wafted throughout the room. This scent allowed
the patients to better access the memories of the conditioning process and
before long they began to sweat, most likely remembering the faces and the
shocks they received. After a while the sleeping patients appeared increasingly
less stressed and slept more soundly.
After they woke up, the patients were again shown the series
of faces. When they came across the particular face that was originally
associated with the electric shock, the stress response was considerably less. It was almost as if the patients had gone
through exposure therapy. In fact, according to Jan Born, one of the lead
scientists on the program, that is exactly what happened. Conscious or not, the
memories of the fearful stimulus were still activated and fears were still
faced and the effect was still the same. More research is needed for this form
of conditioning, most notably how long the effects actually last and whether or
not it could effectively treat long term fears, but this is still a rather
promising result.
Shen, H. (2013, September 22). Sleep therapy can change bad memories. Scientific American, Retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=sleep-therapy-can-change-bad-memories
Fascinating article Kristen. If it continues to prove successful i think this would be a huge breakthrough in psychotherapy. However, reading the article it seems that Born's study focused only on social phobia (social anxiety disorder) and I was curious if you had found research on how this treatment may work with those who have much more odd phobias like fear of clowns or storms? Also, the subjects tested had been induced to have a phobia, and did not have it long before the treatment; any research on how this might work with those that have had a phobia for many years? Anyone please feel free to comment on this if you find any articles as I think it would be interesting to see how researchers plan to target for these things. Overall a very good find.
ReplyDeleteI thought this was a very interesting post. In response to your questions Jorge, I found another study that used sleep therapy for arachnophobia (fear of spiders). This study found that sleep after exposure therapy helped promote extinction of the fear more than exposure therapy alone. Though this research used sleep therapy in conjunction with exposure therapy, it is evident that sleep may speed up the extinction process. From reading this article, it seems that sleep enhances memory (especially emotional memory), which makes sense because we have all heard that getting a good night's sleep before a test helps internalize the material learned. I'm curious about how sleep specifically helps solidify memory, is there a physiological mechanism at work?
ReplyDeletePace-Schott EF, Verga PW, Bennett TS, Spencer RMC. 2012. Sleep promotes consolidation and generalization of extinction learning in simulated exposure therapy for spider fear. Journal of Psychiatric Research. 46(8): 1036-1044. ISSN 0022-3956, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2012.04.015.
I also found this article to be particularly interesting. The results sound promising, but I don’t see how people with long-term phobias could be treated with it. The study associated scents to very specific memories. People suffering from a phobia would have to relive those memories in some way to associate the memories with a scent. So to make the association, the patient would have to be exposed to whatever triggers they’re phobia.
ReplyDeleteI also found the arachnophobia article, but Dominique beat me to the punch. The results from that study sound like an effective treatment method for people suffering from long term phobias, but the technique Kiersten described merits more attention.
Thank you for the wonderful read! I found an article that suggests smell can also relate to memory, but in a different way than you mentioned. In this particular study researchers had participants learn locations of cards on a screen, they were then given a whiff of a certain scent, and then slept for a limited amount of time. Upon waking up the participants had better memory recollection than those participants who were not given a scent to associate with the cards.
ReplyDeleteI find this topic very applicable to us being in school, as we are constantly trying to make our memory and recollection of school information better. I have also heard that if you smell a certain scent while studying for a subject, then you take an exam, while smelling the same scent your memory of that topic is significantly improved and you end up doing better on exams. I find the power of olfactory receptors and memory association to be fascinating. Thanks!
Abraham B. 2011. Nose knows- the power of smell: How mixing smelling and studying can help improve your grade [online]. Liberty Champion.
http://www.liberty.edu/champion/2011/09/nose-knows-the-power-of-smell/ [13 October 13].
Carey B. 2007. Scent may aid memory, study finds [online]. The New York Times Healthscience. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/health/09iht-sleep.4855045.html [13 October 13].
This research does seem promising, but like Joel, I am a bit skeptical on how they can apply this therapy to long-term phobias that aren't triggered by smell. To answer Dominique’s question, there is a new theory that neuronal reactivation during sleep may be the principal mechanism for long term memory consolidation. The theory is that while we are awake we store episodic memories into temporary compartments. Then, during slow-wave-sleep neurons are reactivated and transform the temporary representations into long-term memories. Neuron reactivation also redistributes the memories into a series of extrahippocampal networks, and ultimately changes the initial episodic memories into pattern-like representations. It makes sense then that the therapy Kiersten wrote about occurs during slow-wave-sleep instead of say REM sleep, since this is when memories are being stored. However, for this sleep therapy to really work, we would have to trigger neuron reactivation with something the patient associates with the phobia while awake. If this association is visual rather than olfactory, it may be more difficult.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.annualreviews.org.dml.regis.edu/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-neuro-062012-170429