BY DANTE FUOCO

In print | Published April 23, 2009

Jack Keefe ’10 likes the theories behind neuroscience, whether it’s studying neural tracts or following receptors’ interactions. But that’s not why he chose psychobiology as his major.

“It’s fun to hypothesize about what’s going on,” he said. “But really the ultimately cool thing[s] — and the reason why I wanted to pursue both psychology and the biology in this sense — are the clinical aspects, the aspects of the research in the foreseeable future that actually have some relevance … to improving the human condition.”

Keefe and six other students at the college may soon be part of this kind of progressive endeavor. Ami Belmont ’09, Connor Darby ’09, Andres Freire ’10, Christopher Mayer-Bacon ’11, Lauren Walker ’09, Kate Walton ’11, and Keefe are working in psychology professor Allen Schneider’s lab, studying the effect of stress on memory in rats. In the future, this research could play a fundamental role in knowing how to clinically treat people with stress-related memory disorders, such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“The therapeutic implications are clear,” Schneider said. He explained that if what holds true from work on rats in the laboratory holds true for people with a genetic predisposition for PTSD then “the obvious next step is to develop drugs to offset those genetic effects.”

Schneider’s lab has discovered that, for memory in rats, there is a natural protective mechanism activated during stress that prevents a memory from becoming too excessive or too weak, leading to the creation of an “optimal memory.” When the lab compromised this mechanism with a drug, the memory became abnormal in its strength.

Schneider believes that there is a similar sort of mechanism in humans that, when compromised under stress, makes memories become abnormally strong. PTSD is the most notable example because it is characterized by abnormally strong and emotionally evasive memories after a particularly traumatic incident.

PTSD is on a national rise, often getting the name “Soldier’s Disease” because of veterans’ duress after being in combat, Belmont said. Belmont, like Darby, is writing her thesis on how stress affects memory, drawing from research that she has been conducting with Schneider since last summer.
Keefe added that, for people with PTSD, “the initial memory is so powerful that it becomes an evasive thought … The memory keeps playing back.”And PTSD isn’t just psychologically harming — it physically “can rack hell on your body,” Keefe added.

Darby and Keefe explained some of the procedures that the lab has done.

The experimenters had an apparatus that is split into two compartments, one light and one dark. When the rat ran to the dark compartment, it got a shock known as “a learning experience.” The researchers then either did or didn’t inject the rat with the drug naloxone. The next day, researchers found that the rats that were not injected with the drug had a strong retention of the memory because they did not go over to the dark as quickly as the day before or didn’t go over at all. On the other hand, the ones that received the drug were more naïve and still went to the dark, indicating that the memory of the shock was impaired.

The lab also found that a rat’s memory of the shock was impaired the next day after it had the intense stress condition of swimming for fifteen minutes and after it had naloxone. Conversely, a rat’s memory was actually enhanced the next day after it had the mild stress condition of being in a dimly lit space and after it had naloxone.

Walton, Darby and Keefe said that it’s often clinically infeasible, however, to treat people hours after their emotional trauma — or, for that matter, know which patients will be affected or if they have a genetic predisposition for the disorder. To deal with this, Schneider’s lab is exploring if a memory’s emotional duress can be dampened not only after it has been newly acquired, but also when it’s been reactivated.

In this experience, Darby said that instead of having the drug manipulation on the first day, the lab has it on the second day after reactivating the memory somehow. They could do this through putting the rats in the dark, forcing them to recall the memory, and then subsequently have drug manipulation with different degrees of stress. Darby said that impaired retention on the third day led the lab to believe “that you can impair retention of fear-related memory with naloxone, and the key to naloxone’s effectiveness is whether” you have this stress.

When asked if the lab’s work was unique, Walton felt confident — “[for] an undergraduate school, definitely,” she said.

She added that the experience is also unique for the students. Since Schneider is looking to publish his work, Walton described the students’ work with him as an “intimate look into not only experiments, but also publishing articles.”

“It’s a really rare opportunity to be that involved with research,” she said. “Not only am I carrying out the research, but I’m also in discussions with Professor Schneider in the implications of the research, interpreting the results, and coming up with additional experiments.”

Belmont agreed, speaking about how she sees this research already affecting her future. Her work with Schneider at the college has given her a foundation for graduate school and research positions after college, she said.

“The experience has definitely impacted my decision to pursue research jobs after graduation, as well as to pursue a Ph.D in clinical psychology with an emphasis on neuroscience later,” she added.

And when asked what the students have added to the research, Schneider spoke highly of their work with him: “A freshness, a willingness to look at the research and literature in new ways, and often seeing beyond the narrowing impact of the disciplinary perspectives.”

« RETURN TO NEWS

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »