Memory Reconsolidation FAQ
Last updated 14 March 2020
Have you read about memory reconsolidation, but keep having more questions as you learn about it? You aren't alone. It's a new and somewhat complex phenome-non. Here are answers to a range of questions about it.
Q: Are juxtaposition experiences in Coherence Therapy ever unsuccessful?
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Q: I've read that understanding psychotherapy in terms of memory reconsolidation is a "nontheoretical" approach. What does that mean?
A: It means that this framework for understanding deep change consists almost entirely of empirical observations, with very little reliance on speculative conceptualization or metaphorical explanation. It consists of well-replicated reconsolidation research findings that have identified the well-defined steps of a process innate to the brain, combined with a large and growing body of clinical observations: when therapists guide the same sequence of experiential steps that reconsolidation researchers have identified, they observe the same markers of profound change that reconsolidation researchers have observed. And whenever those markers of transformational change are observed in therapy, the key experiential steps can be found to have preceded them, even if they were not noticed as they occurred.
So, by understanding memory reconsolidation, therapists come into direct cooperation with the brain's innate process of deep, lasting change and gain a unifying, integrative understanding of a core process shared by a wide range of seemingly very different therapy systems.
Q: What induces the destabilization or unlocking of the neural encoding storing a target learning, opening the five-hour "reconsolidation window" during which the target learning can be erased by new learning?
A: When reconsolidation was first detected conclusively in 2000, neuroscientists initially jumped to the incorrect conclusion that every time a particular learning is reactivated, the memory circuits storing that learning are destabilized or deconsolidated, launching the reconsolidation process. In other words, they thought that reactivation alone launches the reconsolidation process. This incorrect interpretation of early results spread widely among both neuroscientists and science journalists, and still sometimes shows up in their new writings.
The correct understanding of destabilization first emerged in research published in 2004 and has had many confirmations since then. It is now definite that reactivation alone does not trigger destabilization. Rather, what is required is reactivation plus an additional experience that significantly mismatches what the reactivated target learning expects or "knows" about how the world is or behaves. The crucial ingredient for unlocking synapses and launching reconsolidation is what neuroscientists call a mismatch experience or prediction error experience. For a list of studies that have demonstrated that a reactivated learning must encounter an unexpected discrepancy in order to induce its deconsolidation/reconsolidation, click here. (See also Table 2.1 on p. 21 in Unlocking the Emotional Brain.)
For example, suppose the target learning was previously created by several repetitions of turning on a blue light and delivering a mild electric shock several seconds later. If the blue light is turned on again now, that learning is reactivated immediately, but its memory circuits are not destabilized because no mismatch experience has occurred. Researchers have shown that even if the blue light stays on without any shock being delivered, a decisive-enough mismatch or prediction error has still not occurred because, with the light still on, the shock might still happen, so destabilization still is not induced. It is when the blue light is turned off with no shock occurring that a decisive mismatch experience occurs and synapses unlock, because now it is definite that no shock will occur even though the blue light came on. This shows us that what does, or doesn't, constitute a mismatch experience depends on the specific makeup of the original learning.
In psychotherapy, the learnings involved are more complex and involve more memory networks than does the above example of classical conditioning, but the same principle applies. Detailed examples of carrying out this process in therapy are given in chapters 3-6 of Unlocking the Emotional Brain.
Q: The process of extinction consists of experiences that contradict the target learning, so I don't see how reconsolidation is different from extinction. Is reconsolidation a type of extinction?
A: No, reconsolidation is not a type of extinction or an enhancement of extinction. Researchers have shown that reconsolidation and extinction are two distinct processes both neurologically and in their behavioral results. The reconsolidation process makes the target learning receptive to being modified and even nullified by new learning for several hours, whereas extinction produces only a temporary suppression of the target learning by a competing counterlearning.
Despite those fundamental differences, confusion nevertheless arises because both reconsolidation and extinction begin with a non-reinforcement experience, that is, a reactivation of the target learning by a cue (conditioned stimulus) followed by non-occurrence of the unconditioned stimulus that is expected to accompany the cue, according to the target learning. As explained in answering the preceding question, the reconsolidation process is launched when a memory mismatch, or prediction error experience, occurs. Isn't a non-reinforcement a memory mismatch? What, then, governs whether reconsolidation or extinction is induced?
The answer to that question is a somewhat subtle matter. The most well-developed explication to date appears to be that in the 2015 journal article "Memory Reconsolidation Understood and Misunderstood" by Bruce Ecker. Ecker shows that in laboratory studies, reactivation of the target learning by the conditioned stimulus followed by non-occurrence of the unconditioned stimulus may or may not produce memory mismatch, depending on how the structure of the original learning and the structure of the non-reinforcement experience compare in detail. Once it is recognized that non-reinforcement does not necessarily create a prediction error experience, it then becomes understandable that reconsolidation occurs if non-reinforcement does create a mismatch experience, and extinction occurs if it does not.
Q: When my panicky therapy client drives on the highway and the feared terrible fiery crash doesn't happen, that seems to be a mismatch experience, as needed to launch reconsolidation, yet it doesn't unlock or erase the learned fear. Doesn't this show that the model is incorrect?
A: We have to look closely at the content of the problematic learning in order to recognize which experiences do, and which ones do not, actually serve as a mismatch or prediction error experience. In this case, the original learning is not that a car crash happens on every drive; it's that a crash might happen unpredictably on any drive. That learning is not mismatched or disconfirmed by an accident not happening on any one drive or on any number of drives.
The point is that the specific elements of the target learning determine whether or not some experience is an actual contradiction of what the learning "knows." The overall look of the situation is not a reliable gauge of this. The specifics of the target learning have to be brought to light and recognized in order for a truly contradictory experience to be found or created.
Q: On what basis do you maintain that the process found by neuro-
scientists to induce memory reconsolidation is actually carried out in Coherence Therapy? Neuroscientists' procedures in reconsolidation experiments seem very different from what could possibly be happening in therapy sessions.
A: Reconsolidation research was done initially with animals and chemical agents, but subsequently numerous studies with human subjects have demonstrated the erasure of an implicit emotional learning using methods that are entirely experiential, with no use of chemical agents. (For details see p. 25 in Unlocking the Emotional Brain.)
Each of those studies followed this process: create an emotional learning; then reactivate it so that the person is actively expecting the occurrence of what was learned; then create an experience that differs from what the reactivated learning expects to happen. The novel or contradictory experience during reactivation is the critical ingredient in response to which the synapses storing the target learning unlock. Then, several repeated experiences of new learning directly revise and rewrite the target learning, permanently altering the content of the target memory.
Coherence Therapy consists of the same specific process: reactivate the symptom-generating emotional learning or schema to be erased, making the person vividly aware of what he or she knows and expects according to that schema; then create a concurrent experience that contradicts what the emotional schema knows and expects (which is called a "juxtaposition experience" in Coherence Therapy); and repeat the contradictory experience a few times, so it serves as new learning that unlearns and rewrites the symptom-generating schema.
That process was identified by Ecker and Hulley through several years of studying therapy sessions in which there occurred a thorough, lasting disappearance of a previously intense emotional theme and response. They then defined a therapy consisting of that process, which they described in their book Depth Oriented Brief Therapy published in late 1995. In 2004, neuroscientists studying memory reconsolidation identified the same specific process, confirmed in many subsequent studies. They use the phrases "mismatch experience" or "prediction error experience" for what is called a juxtaposition experience in Coherence Therapy.
Coherence Therapy consists of creating the same specific sequence of experiences that neuroscientists have identified as being required for profound unlearning and erasure, and produces the same distinctive markers of erasure that neuroscientists regard as confirmation that erasure via memory reconsolidation has occurred: a specific emotional reaction no longer occurs physiologically or subjectively in response to cues that formerly triggered it; behavioral symptoms generated by that emotional reaction also no longer occur; and these changes then persist permanently with no further preventative measures.
Q: You call it a "juxtaposition experience" that unlocks and erases a target learning through memory reconsolidation, but isn't that really the same thing as a "corrective emotional experience," which isn't new at all?
A: That question boils down to this one: Is a corrective emotional experience always a juxtaposition experience? The answer is no, because what a therapist might regard to be a corrective emotional experience does not necessarily create a juxtaposition experience. Here is why:
A corrective emotional experience consists of experiencing something different than was ever experienced before, something that was needed but was missing. It is an experience that creates new knowing, new meaning, new feelings, and new learning. However, those new elements are not automatically or necessarily experienced in a conscious juxtaposition with the longstanding knowings, meanings, feelings and learnings that have been maintaining the person's problems and symptoms.
In other words, a corrective emotional experience supplies the material for one side of a potential juxtaposition experience, but does not inherently access and reactivate the other side concurrently, to create a juxtaposition. This means that a corrective emotional experience can fail to be a juxtaposition experience, in which case it is functioning not as a transformational process but as a counteractive process that does not disconfirm and dissolve a symptom-requiring schema.
A therapist who understands that transformational change requires juxtaposition follows a corrective emotional experience by then guiding a juxtaposition experience explicitly. What is needed to unlock synapses and erase a target emotional learning is an experience of sharp mismatch or prediction error, created by juxtaposition of the target learning with vivid contradictory knowledge---not just an experience of a preferred emotional state or a preferred belief.
In a juxtaposition experience, the client is lucidly accessing both the problematic original learning and the preferred new learning in the same field of awareness---not just the preferred new learning by itself. If we guide a corrective emotional experience by focusing only on the preferred new experience, it can too easily fail to be a true juxtaposition experience as needed for bringing about transformational change.
But if we regard juxtaposition experiences to be the true corrective emotional experiences, then we have it all and we will facilitate therapeutic breakthroughs with the highest consistency. (However, the term "corrective" expresses a pathologizing, rationalistic, invalidating view of a person's existing emotional learnings, and is therefore somewhat alien to the Emotional Coherence Framework and to Coherence Therapy, which are non-pathologizing and constructivist in their conceptualizations and labels.)
Q: Long before neuroscientists identified reactivation-and-disconfirmation as an erasure process in memory reconsolidation research, and long before Ecker and Hulley built that process into Coherence Therapy, there were many systems of psychotherapy, starting with Alexander and French in 1946, in which one can recognize that same process. So, why should the clinical framework taught by Ecker and colleagues be viewed as groundbreaking for the psychotherapy field?
A: Ecker and colleagues do not describe Coherence Therapy as the first or only system of therapy that produces transformational change through the memory reconsolidation process of reactivation-and-disconfirmation. In fact, their writings and presentations emphasize and extensively document how that process occurs in a wide range of therapy systems. For example, in their Routledge book, Unlocking the Emotional Brain, chapter 6 reviews previously published case examples of AEDP, EMDR, Emotion-Focused Therapy, and IPNB to show in detail that each of those systems carries out the specific steps of the process, though the steps are embedded non-obviously in each system's methods and are not identified in each system's description of itself. That demonstration project was later extended to several other therapy systems, all listed online here (ten different therapy systems as of early 2020).
Those demonstrations support the hypothesis of Ecker et al. that whenever the well-defined markers of transformational change are produced by any therapy sessions, it means that those sessions carried out the erasure process, whether or not the steps of the process were recognized by therapist or client. That hypothesis is also put forward in Ecker's writings, including the 2018 journal article that is his most rigorous and thorough account of the process.
One of the strengths of Coherence Therapy is that it does explicitly call for the steps of the erasure process in its core methodology. Nevertheless, Ecker states in introductory seminars on Coherence Therapy that many different systems of therapy carry out the core process that nullifies an emotional learning through memory reconsolidation, and he shows a PowerPoint slide listing about 15 therapy systems as examples of that. He states, "No system of therapy could ever claim ownership of this process. It’s the brain's process, and different systems have different ways of fulfilling it."
In some clinical workshops, Ecker has also said, "If you are already getting transformational change with most of your clients in most of your sessions without conceptually knowing about memory reconsolidation, great! You don’t need to know about memory reconsolidation. Otherwise, understanding memory reconsolidation can bring a very satisfying boost in the consistency of our therapeutic effectiveness."
So, it is true that the erasure process of reactivation-and-disconfirmation has been embedded in some systems of psychotherapy since long before that process was identified in memory reconsolidation research or became the explicit methodology of Coherence Therapy. However, models of therapeutic change developed within the clinical field, based on clinical observations and clinical outcome research, are intrinsically self-referential and shaped by both cherry-picking and favored theoretical concepts, so they cannot decisively lay bare a fundamental, objective mechanism of change. The proliferation of many competing models of change and theoretical orientations in the psychotherapy field are proof of that inherent indecisiveness. Each such model has no decisive basis and therefore has no more validity than any of the other inferred models of change developed from within the clinical field based on theory, clinical observations, and clinical outcome research.
What's groundbreaking now is having rigorous empirical research from outside of the clinical field—neuroscience research on memory reconsolidation—that identifies reactivation-and-disconfirmation as the brain's innate process for fundamentally unlearning and nullifying implicit emotional learnings. This is the first time in the history of the psychotherapy field that we have an understanding of change based objective principles that are fully independent of theoretical models and interpretations of clinical observations and clinical outcome research. That is an historic change in the discussion within the clinical field about models of change. For the first time we have an objective, independent mechanism of change that shows us why any system of therapy works, when it works. A unified, objective understanding of the entire panoply of psychotherapy systems is now possible. That is the inclusive new paradigm that Ecker et al. are spearheading.
Q: When neuroscientists discuss the clinical use of reconsolidation, they usually mention the mitigation of only fear memories and traumas. Is Coherence Therapy restricted to treating fears and traumas? What about the many other kinds of problems and symptoms presented by therapy clients, such as depression, anger, perfectionism or other compulsive behaviors, shame, or low self-esteem?
A: Coherence Therapy is a completely generalized implementation of the same process, so it is not limited to emotional learnings involving fear or trauma. In fact, researchers have already demonstrated the use of reconsolidation to unlock and erase or modify a range of different types of learning and memory, other than fear memories. Probably neuroscientists limit their discussion of clinical application to fear and traumas simply because that is the type of memory they have studied most and understand best.
Practitioners of Coherence Therapy have applied the process successfully for many types of symptoms and their underlying emotional learnings, such as those centered upon loss, powerlessness, attachment patterns, despair, aloneness, low self-worth, anger, autonomy, injustice, and many others, as well as fear, anxiety and panic.
When Ecker and Hulley were examining profound change events in their therapy sessions, they were looking for a process pattern that was the same for all types of symptoms and all kinds of emotional learning. This resulted in identifying a broadly applicable, versatile process, and years later, when neuroscientists identified the experiential process of erasure via memory reconsolidation, it was the same distinct process.
Q: In a 2010 NYU study published in Nature, Schiller et al. used wrist electrodes and a computer screen with colored squares. Is that how Coherence Therapy is done?
A: No, not at all. Coherence Therapy uses methods that are emotionally rich and deep, yet it is the same process or sequence of experiences as used in reconsolidation research by neuroscientists. That sequence of experiences can be created by a wide range of concrete techniques that differ enormously.
For example, neuroscientist Lissa Gallucio at Rutgers University used a technique with infants that was physically quite different from the technique used by NYU neuroscientists Schiller et al with adults, yet the same process was followed: reactivation of the target implicit memory followed by an experience that contradicts what the memory expects, while the memory is reactivated.
For carrying out that same process in Coherence Therapy, the techniques are suitable to the more complex and emotionally vulnerable implicit memory material involved, as compared with the simple implicit memories that neuroscientists create for their studies. Description of how the process takes place in Coherence Therapy, as well as in AEDP, EFT, EMDR and IPNB, is available in Unlocking the Emotional Brain.
The keys steps of the core process are well-defined in Coherence Therapy, but because of the complexity of emotional implicit memory in therapy, the process is not reducible to a formulaic protocol. Success requires skill on the part of the therapist to carry out the key steps of the process suitably for the individual client's unique material and personality.
The nature of the process in Coherence Therapy is not that of a "procedure" being administered; rather, the work has a very personal quality, and the therapist's empathetic accompaniment is an important catalyst.
Q: The terminology is confusing: neuroscientists refer to the entire process as "reconsolidation," but isn’t it the very last stage of the process where reconsolidation occurs?
A: That is correct. The reconsolidation or re-locking of the altered memory is the very last stage of the process. Nevertheless, the term "reconsolidation" has already come to be the name of the whole process.
What comes first is the unlocking or de-consolidation of the target implicit memory, what neuroscientists term the "destabilization" of the memory trace, returning it to a "labile" condition in which it is revisable or disruptable. The previously locked synapses are physically, molecularly unlocked. Then the "reconsolidation window" is open for a limited time, during which a contradictory experience can rewrite the memory, altering or deleting it. In less than 6 hours, a built-in, complex molecular mechanism re-locks the synapses, closing the window and launching the reconsolidation of the memory. Like the original consolidation of a new memory, which takes weeks, reconsolidation takes an extended time to complete the molecular and structural process that finalizes the redesigned synapses.
Q: Neuroscientists always wait at least 24 hours before testing the outcome after a new, contradictory learning experience has been administered during the reconsolidation window. In Coherence Therapy, do you likewise have to wait until the next session to know whether a juxtaposition experience has been effective?
A: When a juxtaposition experience has been successful with therapy clients, the subjective experience of a dramatically changed emotional reality is immediately felt and described by them. Later in the session, when we test for the existence of the old memory by guiding the client to focus on former trigger cues (such as guiding a client to imagine her mother getting angry at her), the non-re-evocability of the old memory is equally evident. When we persist in guiding the client to have the old response and empathetically remind him or her of the old emotional reason for having that response, the client tries to allow that response to happen but then says that that response feels either lifeless or seems "silly" to have, or even funny or absurd, and some clients actually go into laughter at how funny the old response now seems to them (such as former terror of mom's rage).
These effects are plainly apparent in videos of such sessions. The newly revised schema may not yet be well-stabilized neurally, but it is clearly in effect immediately, as well as in subsequent sessions.
Q: Are juxtaposition experiences in Coherence Therapy ever unsuccessful?
A: Yes. If the target schema continues to reactivate, this tells us either that the juxtaposition experience needs to be repeated, or that resistance to schema dissolution is occurring (a topic covered in Unlocking the Emotional Brain); or that there exists some other component of the original schema that was not specifically disconfirmed and needs its own juxtaposition experience; or that the target schema is encoded in more than one memory network corresponding to more than one behavioral context, such as "at home with family" and "at work," in which case a separate juxtaposition experience in each context may be needed in order to erase the schema in each memory network.
Q: Does reconsolidation actually erase the physical existence of the neural circuits storing an implicit emotional learning? Or do the neural circuits still exist, but with altered contents of what is encoded by them?
A: To answer this question accurately requires covering a number of aspects.
First, neuroscientists have put much thought and effort into determining whether the behavioral observations of erasure of an emotional learning are due to elimination of the root encoding of that target learning or rather are due to disruption of only the neural circuitry involved in reactivating the target learning. Neuroscientists refer to a "storage deficit" versus a "retrieval deficit." Experimental evidence has accumulated strongly in favor of storage deficit, i.e., true erasure of the root encoding of the target learning. This means that the answer to the question is yes, erasure eliminates the physical existence of the neural encoding of the target learning.
But perhaps not 100% of the neural encoding is dismantled. Erasure means that the target learning can no longer be re-cued behaviorally into any degree of its former expression in behavior and/or state of mind. However, at least one study has shown that even after such erasure, an artificial process (the "optogenetic" technique in which individual neurons are activated by laser light) can reactivate a still-existing portion of the neural circuitry of the erased emotional learning, producing the behavioral expression that can no longer be re-cued naturally. This finding has not yet been reproduced enough to be solidly established, but tentatively neuroscientists regard it as an indication that not all of an erased emotional learning's neural circuits are dismantled. The still-existing residue is too weak to be retriggered behaviorally, so its existence is not a significant issue for purposes of psychotherapy, though it is of interest to neuroscientists.
Given how conservative neuroscientists are, as a rule, in describing and interpreting their research findings, it is noteworthy that many neuroscientists describe and write about "erasure", as for example in this article: Haubrich, J., Bernabo, M., Baker, A.G., & Nader, K. (2020). Impairments to Consolidation, Reconsolidation, and Long-Term Memory Maintenance Lead to Memory Erasure. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 43. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-neuro-091319-024636