Reinforce useful memories or mitigate those that hurt by regulating the intensity of the emotions we feel when we recall them to our mind. It’s an experimental strategy, for now. But it could open up new intervention scenarios and thus offer new opportunities to people with addictions or PTSD, and also to improve learning in children, or memory in the elderly. He explained it Cristina Alberini, neurobiologist of New York University, guest at the Maxxi Auditorium in Rome and speaker, together with six other world-renowned neuroscientists, of the third conference of the cycle Emotions, conceived by BrainCircleItalia and the European Brain Research Institute (EBRI) and dedicated to the Nobel Rita Levi-Montalcini to enhance women in science.
Emotions fix memories
“Emotions, positive and negative, help to fix the memories of our life, those that form our identity and help us make decisions: it is a mechanism developed by evolution and useful for our survival: it allows us to remember where we found useful resources or even and where instead we encountered dangers “, explained the neuroscientist, a career dedicated to the study of the molecular basis of learning and memory.
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A memory, when it has just formed in the brain, is fragile, it is labile. Emotions help consolidate that experience into long-term memory. This mechanism is true for good memories (concerts, art exhibitions, for example) and also for bad ones: wars, accidents, violence or illness. But there is also a second moment in which the stored memory becomes fragile again and that is when we recall it to mind.
A time window
“From experiments conducted on mice subjected to trauma – told Alberini in Rome – we have seen what happens in the brain when it is subjected to an excess of negative emotions and that is that animals develop what we can define a stress disorder when they experience a second event. negative”.
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In practice (but things are a little more complicated than that), animals exhibit the symptoms of post-traumatic stress – that is, they are fearful, anxious, fear places and contexts never seen before, and hormone receptors increase in their brains. stress – after a stressful memory has built up. Simplifying this means that “there is a time interval in which the traumatic memory is still fragile, and that we have a window of time to intervene and modify the memory with drug treatments or behavioral therapies,” said Alberini, whose research group at New York has successfully experimented on animal models with drugs that block stress hormone receptors and are able to attenuate negative memories.
“By interacting with the mechanism of consolidation – said the scientist – it is possible to act on memories linked to psychopathologies. In mice, by administering drugs that act in the amygdala (a region of the limbic system that manages emotions, ed) it worked”.
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Some research groups have started the first clinical trials of similar treatments on war veterans, “with positive but still limited results,” added Alberini. An interesting challenge for the future will be studying these neurological mechanisms in children, “it will allow us not only to improve educational and training strategies, but also to prevent the development of neuropsychiatric disorders such as anxiety and depression”, concludes the expert.
Women and stereotypes
‘Emotions’ is an itinerant Forum that will end in May and is divided into eight conferences: after Jerusalem, Genoa and Rome, the next stops will be Lugano, Milan, Geneva, London and Lisbon (for info and live streaming www.emotionsbrainforum.org/ ). The reports of each meeting will always and only be held by women who will decline, each for their field of study or research, the theme of emotions.
“We want to focus on female excellence in the field of science, overturn the stereotype that links emotions to a supposed female inferiority, while emotions are indispensable in all cognitive abilities. Emotions are not a female handicap, but on the contrary. are necessary for the functioning of the brain and men too should regain possession of their emotional intelligence to face the challenges of the Third Millennium (…). man to woman’s emotionality “. said Viviana Kasam, president of BrainCircleItalia.
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Art and science are not worlds apart
The title of the Rome conference was ‘The Great Beauty – can neuroscience explain art?’, About the relationship between art and science, Pietro Calissano, co-founder with Rita Levi-Montalcini and former president of EBRI said that “Rita Levi-Montalcini (…) represents a perhaps unique case of operative symbiosis between art and science. She made a huge contribution to the progress of neuroscience often inspired, as she herself affirmed numerous times, by an artistic predisposition “(…)”. The creativity of the woman who discovered the NGF, the Nerve Growt Factor “proves – concluded Calissano – that the division between art and science it is often wrong. “
From medieval illustrations to Proust’s Recherche
Together with Cristina Alberini there were 6 other world-famous neuroscientists: Merav Ahissar, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who talked about the areas of the brain that perceive beauty, and what stimulates them, Eva Jablonka from Tel Aviv University who dealt with the biological and cultural significance of beauty, Virginia Penhune of Concordia University and McGill University in Montreal, who explained how rhythm and dance involve the auditory and motor systems of the brain, Beatrice de Gelder, of the University of Maastricht, who explained how human forms are perceived by the observer’s brain and how they impact emotions, Lina Bolzoni, of the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, who told how in the Middle Ages and the European Renaissance an art of memory developed, built on visualization (illustrations, drawings …) and Hannah Monyer, EBRI and the University Hospital and German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, who used Marcel Proust’s Recherche to explain how memories are born, consolidated and recalled. Between one relationship and another, Agnese Coco, the first harp of the Rome Opera House, performed pieces by great composers dedicated to great women. Exciting.
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