Unconscious emotional memory remains intact during alcohol intoxication, may impact prevention and intervention

(Medical Xpress) -- Although certain memory processes are impaired during alcohol intoxication, the brain does appear to retain emotionally charged images, particularly in unconscious memory processes, a new study in the September issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs suggests. This finding may have implications for improving alcohol education and treatment programs.

The study looked at two types of memory: explicit (or conscious memory, such as answering a question about yesterday’s weather) and implicit (or unconscious memory, such as performing the steps involved in driving a car or having a conditioned emotional response to a frightening situation).

Acute alcohol intoxication often disrupts explicit memory for emotionally neutral cues, while leaving implicit memory intact.

Further, explicit memory has consistently shown to be improved by emotional content, but emotion’s effect on implicit memory has been less thoroughly examined, says Suchismita Ray, an assistant research professor at the Center of Alcohol Studies at Rutgers University and one of the lead study authors.

The study was designed to examine whether acute alcohol intoxication disrupts memory for emotionally valenced and neutral picture cues using an explicit recall and an implicit repetition priming task. This study is the first to examine how implicit memory priming for emotional cues is affected by acute alcohol intoxication.

The study involved 36 men and women, ages 21–24. All participants consumed a placebo, a nonalcoholic beverage, or an alcoholic beverage designed to create a blood alcohol level of .08 (near the national limit for legal driving). They then viewed emotionally negative, emotionally positive, and emotionally neutral images. During the explicit memory test, participants were asked to recall as many images as they could in detail. For the implicit memory test, participants were shown 360 images (images they had already seen and new images) and had to determine whether each was a real picture or a “non-real” picture (an electronically distorted image). The participants’ speed in making this decision is a measure of implicit memory.

Alcohol intoxication impaired explicit recall of all three types of images, although participants were still able to recall more emotionally charged images (positive or negative) than neutral ones even when intoxicated. In contrast, implicit memory priming was not affected by alcohol intoxication. Whether intoxicated or not, participants made faster decisions about all images they had previously seen compared with new images. This was especially true for previously seen negative images.

“Alcohol dampens overall emotional reactivity, but the brain still allocates more neural resources for emotional cues compared to neutral ones,” says Ray. “And with good reason - emotional memories are important for survival.”

It’s this emotion–memory connection that Ray says can help improve alcohol treatment programs.

“If explicit memory processes for emotional cues are affected by alcohol intoxication and implicit processes are not, it’s very important to develop ways for future treatment and prevention programs to exploit these intact implicit memory processes,” she says. “If alcohol cues are linked to relaxation or fun, we can’t totally delete these links, but perhaps increasing the strength of implicit links between alcohol cues and negative emotional consequences of use could be used to help people in the future. Those implicit memory links would still be available to individuals during intoxication and, thus, may help to reduce drinking when explicit memory for negative consequences is impaired by alcohol.”

Interventions that involve some forms of implicit memory may be especially useful for alcohol treatment because they do not rely primarily on the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for learning new information. In addition to acute alcohol intoxication effects, long-term alcohol and drug use damages certain parts of the brain including the hippocampus, so people may not be able to remember new facts that they learn during the treatment process.

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Provided by Rutgers University

"Unconscious emotional memory remains intact during alcohol intoxication, may impact prevention and intervention." August 21st, 2012.http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-emotional-memory-intact-alcohol-intoxication.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

New study uncovers brain's code for pronouncing vowels

Scientists have unraveled how our brain cells encode the pronunciation of individual vowels in speech. The discovery could lead to new technology that verbalizes the unspoken words of people paralyzed by injury or disease.

Diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease at 21, British physicist Stephen Hawking, now 70, relies on a computerized device to speak. Engineers are investigating the use of brainwaves to create a new form of communication for Hawking and other people suffering from paralysis. -Daily Mail

Scientists at UCLA and the Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology, have unraveled how our brain cells encode the pronunciation of individual vowels in speech. Published in the Aug. 21 edition of Nature Communications, the discovery could lead to new technology that verbalizes the unspoken words of people paralyzed by injury or disease.

"We know that brain cells fire in a predictable way before we move our bodies," explained Dr. Itzhak Fried, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "We hypothesized that neurons would also react differently when we pronounce specific sounds. If so, we may one day be able to decode these unique patterns of activity in the brain and translate them into speech."

Fried and Technion's Ariel Tankus, formerly a postdoctoral researcher in Fried's lab, followed 11 UCLA epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted in their brains to pinpoint the origin of their seizures. The researchers recorded neuron activity as the patients uttered one of five vowels or syllables containing the vowels.

With Technion's Shy Shoham, the team studied how the neurons encoded vowel articulation at both the single-cell and collective level. The scientists found two areas—the superior temporal gyrus and a region in the medial frontal lobe—that housed neurons related to speech and attuned to vowels. The encoding in these sites, however, unfolded very differently.

Neurons in the superior temporal gyrus responded to all vowels, although at different rates of firing. In contrast, neurons that fired exclusively for only one or two vowels were located in the medial frontal region.

"Single neuron activity in the medial frontal lobe corresponded to the encoding of specific vowels," said Fried. "The neuron would fire only when a particular vowel was spoken, but not other vowels."

At the collective level, neurons' encoding of vowels in the superior temporal gyrus reflected the anatomy that made speech possible–specifically, the tongue's position inside the mouth.

"Once we understand the neuronal code underlying speech, we can work backwards from brain-cell activity to decipher speech," said Fried. "This suggests an exciting possibility for people who are physically unable to speak. In the future, we may be able to construct neuro-prosthetic devices or brain-machine interfaces that decode a person's neuronal firing patterns and enable the person to communicate."

Provided by University of California, Los Angeles

"New study uncovers brain's code for pronouncing vowels." August 21st, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-uncovers-brain-code-pronouncing-vowels.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

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