‘The opportunity to know more about making memories and reforming them is tempting’
veterans and terror attack survivors – or even, in a nod to Carrey and Winslet, hopeless romantics struggling to get over an acrimonious break-up.
His pioneering procedure, of which more shortly, allows memories to be updated using a combination of therapy and drug treatment.
It was the concept of exploring – and perhaps transforming – memories that led me to write my debut novel, a thriller called Forget Me.
In the book, a married couple, Hannah and Euan, are trying to cope after a mysterious accident leaves the latter with amnesia. An experimental cure allows Hannah to dive deep into Euan’s fractured memories in a bid to bring back the man she loves – but disturbing secrets are uncovered along the way.
Writing Forget Me made me consider how agonising life must be for the hundreds of thousands of Britons whose relatives struggle to remember them.
My own father George, 78, suffers from vascular dementia – and while he has a good quality of life thanks to the constant care of my mother Marjorie and the delight his granddaughter Arianne, three, brings to him, I know problems caused by his condition have taken their toll on a fiercely intelligent man.
There are currently around 850,000 people living with dementia in this country, and with our ageing population this is projected to rise to 1.6 million in 20 years.
As everyone who is close to somebody with a condition such as dementia knows far too well, the threat of losing their most cherished recollections – their wedding day, the birth of their children – is terrifying.All of which makes the opportunity to know more about the process of creating memories – and learning how to manipulate and reform them – tempting.
In Forget Me, the procedure is carried out by a charismatic neuropsychiatrist named Dr Cal – either a visionary or a carnival trickster – through a fictional process of medical hypnosis.
Curiously, my fictional invention isn’t too dissimilar from Dr Alain Brunet’s real-life medical breakthrough in Canada. His work centres on the “reconsolidation” of a memory – and the use of a simple blood pressure drug.
Propranolol, a beta blocker long used to treat hypertension and migraines, is taken an hour before a therapy session. The patient suffering from a traumatic memory is asked to write down a full account of their unpleasant experience, then they read it out loud.
Dr Brunet explained: “Often when you recall memory, if there’s something new to learn, this memory will unlock and you can update it, and it will be saved again. “We’re using this enhanced understanding on how memories are formed and how they are unlocked and updated and saved again. We’re essentially using this recent knowledge coming out of neuroscience to treat patients.”
The factual elements of memories – where you were, who you were there with, what you were doing – are saved in the brain’s hippocampus. Tiny and complex ridges of grey matter tissue embedded deep in the temporal lobe, they are named after the Greek word for seahorse because that’s just what they look like. The emotions of our memories are locked into the amygdala, the almond-shaped lumps on either side of our brain.
The beta blocker targets this emotional channel so, during Dr Brunet’s treatment, the memory isn’t forgotten, but it does stop hurting. Under the influence of the drug, our brains will save the newly memory as its less painful version.
Results so far suggest around 70 per cent of patients undergoing reconsolidation therapy found relief after only a few sessions.
Irecalled
N the aftermath of terror attacks in Paris and Nice, Dr Brunet launched a programme in France, training around 200 doctors to help treat victims, witnesses and emergency responders.
More than 400 patients have undergone the therapy. It is still in its infancy but few would argue that wiping clean the residue of horror could do anything but allow freedom from mental torment.