1. Neuroscience

Shifting from fear to safety through deconditioning-update

  1. Bruno Popik
  2. Felippe Espinelli Amorim
  3. Olavo B Amaral
  4. Lucas Alvares  Is a corresponding author
  1. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
  2. Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.51207
Share this article
Cite this article
  1. Bruno Popik
  2. Felippe Espinelli Amorim
  3. Olavo B Amaral
  4. Lucas Alvares
(2020)
Shifting from fear to safety through deconditioning-update
eLife 9:e51207.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.51207
  2. Download BibTeX
  3. Download .RIS

Abstract

Aversive memories are at the heart of psychiatric disorders such as phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Here, we present a new behavioral approach in rats that robustly attenuates aversive memories. This method consists of 'deconditioning' animals previously trained to associate a tone with a strong footshock by replacing it with a much weaker one during memory retrieval. Our results indicate that deconditioning-update is more effective than traditional extinction in reducing fear responses; moreover, such effects are long lasting and resistant to renewal and spontaneous recovery. Remarkably, this strategy overcame important boundary conditions for memory updating, such as remote or very strong traumatic memories. The same beneficial effect was found in other types of fear-related memories. Deconditioning was mediated by L-type voltage-gated calcium channels and is consistent with computational accounts of mismatch-induced memory updating. Our results suggest that shifting from fear to safety through deconditioning-update is a promising approach to attenuate traumatic memories.

Data availability

All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Bruno Popik

    Neurobiology of Memory Lab, Biophysics Department, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

  2. Felippe Espinelli Amorim

    Institute of Medical Biochemistry Leopoldo de Meis, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

  3. Olavo B Amaral

    Institute of Medical Biochemistry Leopoldo de Meis, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

  4. Lucas Alvares

    Neurobiology of Memory Lab, Biophysics Department, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil
    For correspondence
    lucas.alvares@ufrgs.br
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-0472-903X

Funding

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (Universal 2018 - 405100/2018-3))

  • Lucas Alvares

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (graduate fellowship)

  • Bruno Popik

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: All procedures followed the Brazilian ethical guidelines for animal research set by the National Council for the Control of Experimental Animal Research (CONCEA) and approved by the committee on the Ethics of Animal Experiments of the UFRGS (number 34547).

Reviewing Editor

  1. Alexander Shackman, University of Maryland, United States

Publication history

  1. Received: August 20, 2019
  2. Accepted: January 30, 2020
  3. Accepted Manuscript published: January 30, 2020 (version 1)
  4. Version of Record published: February 14, 2020 (version 2)

Copyright

© 2020, Popik et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

Metrics

  • 2,425
    Page views
  • 253
    Downloads
  • 14
    Citations

Article citation count generated by polling the highest count across the following sources: Crossref, PubMed Central, Scopus.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Bruno Popik
  2. Felippe Espinelli Amorim
  3. Olavo B Amaral
  4. Lucas Alvares
(2020)
Shifting from fear to safety through deconditioning-update
eLife 9:e51207.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.51207

Categories and tags

Research organism

Further reading

    1. Neuroscience

    THINGS-data, a multimodal collection of large-scale datasets for investigating object representations in human brain and behavior

    Martin N Hebart, Oliver Contier ... Chris I Baker
    Tools and Resources Updated

    Understanding object representations requires a broad, comprehensive sampling of the objects in our visual world with dense measurements of brain activity and behavior. Here, we present THINGS-data, a multimodal collection of large-scale neuroimaging and behavioral datasets in humans, comprising densely sampled functional MRI and magnetoencephalographic recordings, as well as 4.70 million similarity judgments in response to thousands of photographic images for up to 1,854 object concepts. THINGS-data is unique in its breadth of richly annotated objects, allowing for testing countless hypotheses at scale while assessing the reproducibility of previous findings. Beyond the unique insights promised by each individual dataset, the multimodality of THINGS-data allows combining datasets for a much broader view into object processing than previously possible. Our analyses demonstrate the high quality of the datasets and provide five examples of hypothesis-driven and data-driven applications. THINGS-data constitutes the core public release of the THINGS initiative (https://things-initiative.org) for bridging the gap between disciplines and the advancement of cognitive neuroscience.

    1. Neuroscience

    Locomotion: Unraveling the roles of cerebrospinal fluid-contacting neurons

    Claire Wyart
    Insight

    Sensory neurons previously shown to optimize speed and balance in fish by providing information about the curvature of the spine show similar morphology and connectivity in mice.

    1. Neuroscience

    Spatiotemporal organization of human sensorimotor beta burst activity

    Catharina Zich, Andrew J Quinn ... Sven Bestmann
    Research Article

    Beta oscillations in human sensorimotor cortex are hallmark signatures of healthy and pathological movement. In single trials, beta oscillations include bursts of intermittent, transient periods of high-power activity. These burst events have been linked to a range of sensory and motor processes, but their precise spatial, spectral, and temporal structure remains unclear. Specifically, a role for beta burst activity in information coding and communication suggests spatiotemporal patterns, or travelling wave activity, along specific anatomical gradients. We here show in human magnetoencephalography recordings that burst activity in sensorimotor cortex occurs in planar spatiotemporal wave-like patterns that dominate along two axes either parallel or perpendicular to the central sulcus. Moreover, we find that the two propagation directions are characterised by distinct anatomical and physiological features. Finally, our results suggest that sensorimotor beta bursts occurring before and after a movement can be distinguished by their anatomical, spectral and spatiotemporal characteristics, indicating distinct functional roles.