Perhaps most heartbreakingly, there are flash cards Nathan has made as a means of reactivating memory.
The reconsolidation process is hypothesized to be necessary for updating reactivated memories [22].
A time-limited process of reconsolidation appears to be necessary to render reactivated memories stable again [5], [6].
While reconsolidation is generally seen as an adaptive mechanism enabling the updating of reactivated memories in the light of new experiences [6], the results presented here point to its potential side effect: They suggest that reactivated autobiographical memories are, similar to new memories, in danger of being lost.
We note that in the current paradigm, a reminder of the trauma is given prior to the intervention in order to "reactivate" memories, which is also a feature of paradigms intervening on fear memory reconsolidation [42], [43] and may represent an important clinical step.
After the break, all participants were shown a brief film reminder task in which one neutral but recognizable static image from each of the 15 film clips was presented (via slides in PowerPoint) in order to "reactivate" memories for the trauma film [1], [59], [60].
The authors hypothesized that if the previously coupled state of sympathetic arousal was inhibited pharmacologically during the process of reconsolidating reactivated memories, the newly re-stored memory would be permanently dissociated from it [ 41].
The logarithmic or weak power law compression of sensory information typically observed may result from the tuning properties of sensory neurons (Dayan and Abbott 2001) and has furthermore been suggested not only for sensory traces, but also for reactivated memories as well (Gallistel and Gelman 2000; Nieder and Miller 2003; Papini and Pellegrini 2006).
Reactivation is thought to trigger a consolidation-like process because reactivated memory and newly acquired memory have similar time courses of susceptibility to protein synthesis inhibition: they are intact in the short term but impaired in the long term when a protein synthesis inhibitor is administered either upon retrieval or upon de novo learning [ 40].
Consistent with the results shown in Figure 1A, the VEH and ANI groups displayed enhancement and disruption, respectively, of the reactivated memory at PR-LTM, although both groups displayed comparable crossover latency at Reactivation compared to the VEH and ANI groups, respectively, in Figure 1A.
