(Reuters) - A widely available blood pressure pill could one day help people erase bad memories, perhaps treating some anxiety disorders and phobias, according to a Dutch study published on Sunday.
The generic beta-blocker propranolol significantly weakened people's fearful memories of spiders among a group of healthy volunteers who took it, said Merel Kindt, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, who led the study.
"We could show that the fear response went away, which suggests the memory was weakened," Kindt said in a telephone interview.
There is quite a bit wrong with the article, but this highlight does it justice. For instance, are "bad memories" really a problem for anyone? That vacation that didn't go so well, or that time I lost my keys and spent a day wondering around my Boston neighborhood until my roommate got home? Or are we talking about trauma here?
The article, and the researchers, make a huge leap from a "mild shock" and "pictures of spiders" (which is merely a type of conditioning) and post-traumatic stress disorder, which may involve and alter entire sub-systems of the brain, including those that involve intense emotions, information processing, planning, and dissociation. Perhaps, as Jennifer Freyd suggests, true trauma is characterized by an altogether different sort of memory processing. The above study may be just a start, but it is also trivial and, I believe, over-generalized. What bugs me is that it assumes that all memory, no matter what the level of arousal or what the amount of disruption it causes in one's life, is essentially the same. This seems intuitively wrong. Being phobic of spiders is different than having been tortured.
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