New research shows that the very act of remembering can change our memories. As we remember an event we re-experience it in the present and create a new memory. When we remember we alter the experience with the new information of the present-day. The memory is re-formed in the process of calling it up. Memories are plastic, and whatever has happened since and everything that is present around you in the environment changes the new memory.
One researcher stated that paradoxically the truest memory is the memory of an amnesiac who can’t recall a memory, because his memory won’t ever be altered.
Some think that recasting old memories in the light of the present and the reconsolidation of new memories prevents us from living in the past; or maybe there is no such thing as the past? From psychology we know that past and future are marginalized experiences of the present. What we remember from the past and what we imagine will happen in the future are aspects of our momentary present-day process. Memories, present-day experiences, and fantasies about the future are one lived experience and the constituents of the day to day and minute to minute process.
The malleability of memories has therapeutic implications. Brunet completed a large study with nearly 70 PTSD patients. He gave half the group a drug that altered their physiologic and emotional reaction to trauma while they were asked to read a script of their personal traumatic experiences. Those who took the drug (propranolol, a beta blocker) once a week for six weeks while reading the script of their traumatic event showed an average 50 percent reduction in standard PTSD symptoms. They had fewer nightmares and flashbacks in their daily lives long after the effects of the drug had worn off. The treatment didn’t erase the patients’ memory of what had happened to them; rather, it seems to have changed the quality of that memory. “Week after week the emotional tone of the memory seems weaker,” Brunet says. “They start to care less about that memory.”
What can be achieved with a drug can also be accomplished with psychotherapy. Creating a new narrative of a traumatic event that includes emotional attunement/regulation and empowerment will alter the memory in a beneficial way.
Reference:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/How-Our-Brains-Make-Memories.html
https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/LoftusLearning%26MemoryMisinfo05.pdf?uniq=-iv15l6