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Thursday 14 Jan 2016 - 18:00 Makkah mean time-4-4-1437
Chicago, (IINA) - A recent study found that pain could strengthen your memory. A full year after viewing a picture of a random, neutral object, people could remember it better if they had been feeling severe heat when they first saw it, Science News reported.
“The results are fun, they are interesting, and they are provocative”, said neuroscientist A. Vania Apkarian of Northwestern University in Chicago. The findings “speak to the idea that pain really engages memory”.
Neuroscientists G. Elliott Wimmer and Christian Büchel of University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany reported the results in a paper online. The findings are under review at a journal, and Wimmer declined to comment on the study until it is accepted for publication.
Wimmer and Büchel recruited 31 people who agreed to feel pain delivered by a heat-delivering thermode on their left forearms. Each person’s pain sensitivity was used to calibrate the amount of heat they received in the experiment, which was either not painful (a 2 on an 8-point scale) or the highest a person could endure multiple times (a full 8). While undergoing a functional MRI scan, participants looked at a series of pictures of everyday household objects, such as a camera, sometimes feeling pain and sometimes not.
Right after seeing the images, the people took a quiz in which they answered whether an object was familiar, the pain did not influence memory right away, participants remembered about three-quarters of the previously seen objects, regardless of whether pain was present, the researchers found.
However, a year later, people had a better memory for objects viewed while experiencing an eight on the pain scale than objects viewed while feeling a two.
The results suggest that pain “somehow amplifies or stamps in the memories so that they are stored more robustly”, says neuroscientist Ben Seymour of the University of Cambridge in England. By showing that pain can preserve memories for at least a year, the study highlights the power of pain to sculpt behavior, he said. In addition, the experiment probably does not capture the full extent of many painful experiences. As gruesome as 8-out-of-8 heat pain sounds, that is probably nowhere near what someone might feel during a medical procedure or a nasty accident, Seymour says.
Based on fMRI brain scans, pain’s memory boost appeared linked to activity in a part of the insula, a brain area involved in bodily sensations and emotions. Other studies have found that emotionally charged memories seem to be particularly durable.
Apkarian noted that other parts of the brain, particularly those in the medial temporal lobe that have known roles in memory, are likely to be involved.
AG/IINA
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