The Role of Slow Wave Sleep in Memory Pathophysiology: Focus on Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

At a neurobiological level, memories recorded during extreme stressful situations cause maximal amygdalar synapses, storing the events.

Article Description

“Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a clinical condition that may develop after a person experienced a traumatic event. PTSD can be considered as a disorder in which a fear conditioned response fails to extinguish, leading to several symptoms such as re-experiencing of the traumatic moment with intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, and nightmares, avoidance of situations related to the trauma, negative alterations in cognitions and mood, and hyper-arousal…At a neurobiological level, memories recorded during extreme stressful situations cause a maximal potentiation of amygdalar synapses, assumed to temporarily store the events. This causes the saturation of all amygdalar alpha-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazole (AMPA) receptors-bindings sites, preventing the recorded emotional memory trace to be merged with the cognitive memory trace from the hippocampus (Corrigan, 2002; Harper et al., 2009). Therefore, the fragments of emotionally charged memories remain trapped in the limbic system and cannot be transfered to the cortical areas, where a further processing and integration into already existing networks should take place.”

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Article Access

Open Access

Carletto, S., Borsato, T., & Pagani, M. (2017). The Role of Slow Wave Sleep in Memory Pathophysiology: Focus on Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 2050. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02050