Doctor Bryan Strange spoke with Camilo Vásquez about his work and research regarding memory and the human brain. This conversation opened an interdisciplinary space in which to discuss memory and darkness. The conversation took place in late May 2019.
Camilo: Our idea at Carma is to build bridges between disciplines through dialogue and conversations on diverse topics and from different perspectives. This issue explores darkness as a general concept and we’ve been playing around with the idea of dualities, such as light and dark, knowledge and ignorance, remembering and forgetting. With this in mind, we’d like to talk with you about your research on memory and the work you’ve done to “regulate” or “control” memories that don’t allow people to function in their present everyday lives. Having said this, we’d like you to share with us the general idea of your current research on memory.
Bryan: My research is on memory, mainly studying why certain things are remembered more than others. Typically, people remember things that are unexpected. For example, seeing an elephant on the [Carrera] Séptima or any street in Bogotá; that would be something unexpected and you will perhaps remember it for the rest of your life. Other things that happen to us that are well remembered are emotional events, be them positive or negative. Associated with negative emotional events are also pathological conditions such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, different anxiety conditions like phobias. I have been studying the brain mechanisms that underlie these enhanced memory formations for these type of events, in effort to try to understand how treatments may be developed in the future. One way of looking at memory is that it is a very dynamic process. Throughout most of the history of science and medicine we thought of memory as something quite fixed, fixed in the brain in a certain way. Now we are realizing that these memories can be manipulated, modulated, changed over time. One of my research focuses has been reducing memory after that memory has been retrieved. If you activate that memory, there seems to be a way to reduce the strength of that memory, if you apply certain treatments just after a memory is recalled. We worked with neurologically healthy patients, applying general anesthesia, having them learn unpleasant narratives, “stories”, and a week later they would retrieve one of those stories and immediately after they were given a general anesthesia, the next day the emotional aspect of the memory was reduced.
Camilo: When you say “the memory is retrieved” how does that work?
Bryan: In this laboratory model, we show them a slideshow narrative, as if it were a movie, and to retrieve or reactivate the memory we just show them the first slide of the narrative and say, “what do you remember of this slide?” –which is partly covered up. So they start thinking about it and let the brain do its thing. You see the beginning of the movie clip and the brain fills in the rest. We let them retrieve on their own. When it comes to patients, what people are typically doing, for example in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, is having patients write down their unpleasant or traumatic event. When they come back to the clinic they read again the script-written retrieval.
Camilo: Going off a bit on a limb, when the memory retrieval is not done in a safe laboratory environment, how do people cope with this trauma in their day-to-day lives?
Bryan: This is the problem in these conditions. You have spontaneous reoccurrence of the memory, through flashbacks or nightmares; it comes back when you are not trying to retrieve it. Things that are loosely related to the memory will trigger it.
Camilo: We tend to think, very informally, when we are trying to overcome a traumatic memory in psychological treatment, that we should face it and deal with it in a safe environment. I perceive that in your research you are heading in the other direction. Perhaps you are blocking or disenabling said memory.
Bryan: You are correct. What typical exposure therapy or cognitive therapy does is talk about that memory in a safe place to change the association of the memory. What we are doing is thinking that maybe this doesn’t work with all patients. With some patients what we should do is bring the memory back and attack it, not manipulate it, so it is associated with safety, but actually try to reduce the strength of the memory.
Camilo: Coming back to the topic of this issue, darkness, I think what you are doing is very interesting. If we think about this duality of light and dark, or knowledge and ignorance, or seeing and not seeing, what you are suggesting is that we “select” what we remember and leave what we don’t want to remember in the dark. For example, if a person has a memory that is “haunting” and not letting them be, instead of facing the memory like in traditional therapy, and perhaps shedding “light” on it, we are blocking it, putting it in the “dark” and leaving no access to it or it to us. Am I reading this wrong?
Bryan: You are quite right. I am not sure we can say we’re blocking the access or whether we are just reducing the memory itself. We still don’t know how memories are formed in the brain, so we don’t know how the mechanism of action of a general anesthetic affects a memory. It is very difficult to know when you have removed a memory, or dampened it, because the only outputs we have are what we are told they remember. So we don’t know if you have blocked access, or reduced the memory in itself. I don’t think we are blocking access, but it could be the case, now that you mention it.
Camilo: Our time is just about up and there is so much more that we could talk about. I’d like to share what I learned from this conversation. As we spoke I imagined that our brains are like the universe, vast spaces with more darkness than light. In this sense we can see what we shed light on, and everything else, that which has no light on it, is in a state of darkness. So there is always more darkness than light in this image. However, if a certain memory is keeping someone from living and functioning, as we have discussed in the pathological conditions you mentioned, it may be more beneficial for that person not to remember. I find this to be a very poetic idea, to return to darkness in order to be. At the same time, I can’t help but think about collective traumas on a social level, such as war or armed conflict, and this makes me think about the role that artists and historians have in collective memories and the construction of narratives and order. This leaves us with a topic for future conversations on the role these narratives play in the construction of world order. Thank you for your time and for sharing with us, Doctor Strange. Undoubtedly, for us here at CARMA, this is a conversation we will always remember.