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How Does Therapy Work? Part of the Brain Which Stores Trauma Might Also Heal, Study Suggests [newsweek.com]

 

Therapy can treat symptoms of mental conditions from anxiety to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—but how does it work? According to a study in mice, it may tap into a part of the brain that stores trauma and uses it to heal. 

Researchers in Switzerland investigated how therapy tackles even long-term memories of trauma, including those that lead to PTSD. They found fear attenuation may occur in the same group of neurons in the brain that create and store the memories.

Professor Johannes Gräff of the EPFL, Switzerland, whose lab carried out the study, told Newsweek the study is significant because it is the first to show which cells are important in overcoming traumatic memories.  

As scientists don’t fully understand how neurons store our general memories, there is currently a debate in the field around whether suppressing the original memory of the event or rewriting it reduces the severity of the trauma.

The study published in the journal Science offers new data that supports the technique of rewriting, rather than suppressing.

“It shows that memory attenuation is indeed mediated by the same population of neurons that used to store the original trauma, which need to be kept active, rather than suppressed,” explained Professor Gräff.

[To read the rest of this article by Kashmira Gander, click here.]

Image: Getty Images

 

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