Dr. Matt Walker

And in some ways, that's the perfect description of this overnight therapy process, that it becomes a memory that is no longer triggering an emotional reaction.

And in some ways, that's what you want.

If you go back to my description from an evolutionary perspective, I told you that one of the functions of emotions is to red flag and prioritize the memory at the time of learning to say that it's important.

That's a very adaptive process.

It helps us prioritize which things we really should be focusing on and remembering.

But it's not adaptive for you to hold on to that emotion long-term once you've stored it.

And there has been some suggestion in the literature before we were doing this work that maybe one thing you can do with trauma and trauma memories is sleep deprive individuals the very first night after the trauma because we knew at the time sleep is important for memory.

And what you would like to do, and it's very similar to that movie, Sunshine Spotless Mind.

I always forget the... Eternal... Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

I didn't see the movie, but I hear it's good.

Yeah.

And what they try to do is target in the brain these, you know, difficult, painful experiences and just excise them from the brain.

And...

That was the suggestion.

Could you pop those memories out of the biography of that individual and save them the trauma?

I would argue that's not really what you want to do, because let's say that I am I have a trauma experience where I was walking home at night from the sleep laboratory late at night and I was coming down the kind of an alley to take a shortcut and someone sticks me up with a gun, maybe some violence.

I don't want to remove that memory.

I would like to remove the trauma response associated with that memory.

But I would argue for me as an organism, it's still very important for me to remember that that alley was associated with a bad experience and I should forego going down that very same route again.

I want to hold on to the memory, the information.