A team of researchers from Washington State University (USA) has discovered that drugs “hijack” the brain through a brain mechanism that alters the role of memory, specifically the brain circuits responsible for predicting loss emotional. This discovery opens up a new area of therapy research aimed either at altering or deactivating this mechanism and making drug addiction less compulsive.
Those memories associated with drug use champion the cause of drug addiction since the brain reinforces the memories giving them a great emotional weight and connects them with the reward signal and that of the decisions that will later guide our actions. And it is that experts have discovered that using drugs creates memories so strong that they completely hijack our memory , turning our own physiology against us.
To reach these conclusions, the researchers conducted an experiment with rats that were given cocaine in a “drug cage”, in order to associate the drug experience with that same place. Each time they were given drugs, the rats reinforced the memory associated with that specific environment. To test their hypothesis, they extracted the structures called
perineuronal networks, an area of the brain key to tasks such as attention, cognition, inhibitory behavior, learning and memory and found that “ when we manipulated them and removed these networks from the prefrontal cortex, we saw that our animals had more memories poor . It was a very novel finding since no one has ever looked at these structures within the prefrontal cortex in relation to a drug memory ”, explains Megan Slaker, co-author of the work.
The study, which has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience , clarifies that this experiment did not eliminate the memory of drugs but it did reduce their emotional power , which could help neutralize the influence of drugs on memories.
