Periodic Reporting for period 3 - MNEMOSYNE (Brain computer interface to study and manipulate mamories of aversive experience during sleep)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2020-10-01 al 2022-03-31
We want to reverse an aversive experience during wakefulness by a rewarding conditioning during sleep by using our brain-computer interface. This would pave the way to treat post-traumatic brain disorders during sleep by using spontaneous reactivation and avoiding the exposure to the stressful situation that is classically used in exposure therapy. We postulate that sleep reactivations represent the best recall-like strategy to observe the reactivation of the exact same memory trace that led to the development of PTSD.
We also made an unexpected observation during fear learning in the UMaze. We observed freezing in the shock zone (that was expected) but we also observed that the animal froze in the opposite extremity of the UMaze (i.e. a safe zone). That was not expected. But we observed that those freezing periods were full of ripples and correspond to reactivation of the shock but in the hippocampus and the prefrontal. Moreover, we showed that the two freezing n the shock zone and the safe zone were not identical but associated with different breathing and heart rate. These two types of freezing are reminiscent of what is considered as panic versus anxiety whose characterization is still lacking in rodents.
In conclusion, this project is on right tracks to achieve the desired aims.
By the end of the project, we will answer to the following questions:
- Is it possible to create an artificial memory during sleep with aversive instead of rewarding electrical stimulations?
- Is there any difference between awake and sleep replays for aversive and appetitive learning?
- Is the body reaction similar for real experience and for the replays?
- Is body reaction an index of the emotional reaction or an actor?
- Is it possible to reverse an aversive memory acquired during wakefulness by a positive memory created during sleep? It would be a proof of concept for a potential treatment of Post-traumatic stress disorder.