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Researchers at the University of York, in the north of England, report that hearing certain sound signals during sleep would help to overcome certain traumatic memories. According to scientists, these signals could also be used to increase the ability to remember certain things better.
Playing certain sounds while sleeping could help overcome difficult and traumatic memories. This is the conclusion, still at an early stage, drawn from a study by British scientists.
pairs of words
For this, the scientists recruited 29 participants. The latter have learned associations of pairs of words whose particularity is that they overlap. They then spent the night in the sleep laboratory of the University of York, so that the researchers could analyze the waves emitted by their brain during the phases of deep sleep. Then a hammer sound – corresponding to one of the words to be memorized – was played to them.
Memory variations and the importance of sleep
Results: In the morning, the researchers observed an increase in memory for one pair of words but a decrease in memory for the other.
For scientists, this suggests that one can influence memory and induce selective forgetting by playing sounds associated with words during sleep. And that the latter has a crucial role in the effects they observed in their study.
For one of the main authors of this work, Dr Aidan Horner of the Department of Psychology at the University of York, “sleep is essential for memory processing, and our memories are generally better after a period of sleep. The exact mechanisms involved remain unclear, but during sleep it appears that important connections are strengthened and unimportant connections are rejected.“.
Towards a therapeutic path?
Is it then possible to influence the memory of patients who have experienced significant trauma?
For Dr. Bardur Joensen, one of the authors of this work, it is a track that can be considered, even if for the moment their results are very early.Although still very experimental at this stage, the results of our study raise the possibility that we can both increase and decrease the ability to recall specific memories by playing sound cues when an individual is sleeping. People who have experienced trauma can suffer from a wide range of distressing symptoms due to their memories of these events.”
The researcher therefore hopes that their discovery “could potentially pave the way for new techniques for weakening these memories that could be used alongside existing therapies.“. A hope of care for post-traumatic stress syndrome…