December 23, 2009: Neuropod podcasts.

At minute 17:53 in the podcast, there is an interest discussion on how fear memories can be replaced with safer memories. This relates to future, cognitive behavioral therapies, for disorders like PTSD.

Here is a link to the related article in 12/9/09 Nature.

The authors tweaked the timing of extinction therapy so they could take advantage of the fragile reconsolidation period — a window of malleability that opens about three minutes after the memory is reactivated, but closes a few hours later.

Meanwhile, people who got the extinction training 6 hours — instead of 10 minutes — after the reminder, or who got no reminder at all, still showed a significant fear response the next day and the next year.