Neuroscientists at Columbia University in the United States and McGill University in Canada have found a way to treat PTSD. According to the findings of the scientists, bad memories are formed using specific neural processes. If you influence these processes, you can save a person from constant anxiety, reports ScienceAlert.
A person can relive a tragedy that happened to him in the past anew, seeing something that is accidentally associated with bad events (random non-associative memory). For example, if he was robbed in a dark alley where there was a mailbox, then the latter becomes the cause (trigger) of new alarms. It is believed that this is due to weak stimuli generated by the environment and captured by long-term memory, where they are combined with more powerful signals entering through another neural circuit.
Previous research has shown that both types of stimuli induce indistinguishable changes in nerve cells. That is why it was believed that it was impossible to influence random non-associative memory with drugs without damaging the associative memory. The latter is important so that a person in the future can avoid potentially dangerous places or situations. However, other experts believed that the mechanisms responsible for different types of memories are different.
As an object of research, neuroscientists used an animal model - the sea mollusk aplysia (Aplysia). The scientists stimulated two different sensory neurons in animals associated with a motor neuron, so that one is involved in the formation of associative memory, and the other is non-associative. It turned out that in one case the strength of the synapse (connections between neurons) was determined by proteins of the classical form of kinase, and in the other - by atypical kinase.
Selective blocking of classical kinase prevented the formation of non-associative memory. According to scientists, vertebrates, including humans, have similar mechanisms, which will allow the development of drugs that will block the action of triggers that cause re-experiences.