Background information
This is why you touch your face so often
by Anna Sandner
New study sheds light on how to prevent nightmares
5.5.2023
Translation: Veronica Bielawski
A new treatment method has allowed a Swiss research team to permanently chase away nightmares. Targeted memory reactivation (TMR) can help people with nightmare disorder sleep better.
Individuals plagued by nightmares at night often also suffer the effects during the day. An effective treatment would therefore be to stop nightmares in the long term.
In a small neuroscientific experiment, researchers were able to demonstrate a memory-enhancing technique that enables undisturbed sleep for some nightmare sufferers. In the future, the Swiss research team hopes to use this technique to help patients with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Giving bad dreams a good ending
Currently, nightmare disorders are treated with so-called imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT). In this treatment, patients imagine the nightmares with a positive twist by mentally acting out the new story while awake. IRT can reduce the frequency of nightmares in most patients, but it fails to do so in nearly one third.
Targeted memory reactivation helps to banish nightmares
Through targeted memory reactivation (TMR), neuroscientist Sophie Schwartz and her team at the University of Geneva succeeded in enhancing the effect of imagery therapy. In this technique, the individual hears a sound while concentrating on learning something. That same sound is then played again when the individual is asleep. Hearing the beep during sleep can reactivate and strengthen the associated memory – that is, what the individual learned when the sound was previously played.
In the study, 36 people with nightmare disorder were divided into two groups. One group received ordinary IRT training, that is imagining a positive ending to the nightmare. For the other group, IRT was accompanied by a short piano chord.
«Sound on, nightmare off» works in most cases
Every day for two weeks, both groups practised giving their nightmares a good ending by keeping a dream diary. While they slept, the participants wore a headband to detect sleep phases based on the electrical activity in the brain. During the REM stages of sleep, i.e. the dream phases, the piano chord sounded every ten seconds for both groups. Since only the TMR group was conditioned to this sound, only these participants were able to associate the sound with the new scenario from IRT training.
For both groups, IRT training noticeably improved the situation. The group that received only IRT had on average one nightmare per week instead of three. For the group who had linked their positive dream endings to the piano chord, TMR almost completely resolved the nightmares; their weekly average of three nightmares dropped to 0.2. Moreover, the training even promoted happier dreams.
In the long term, too, the combination of IRT and TMR had an advantage. After three months, the average of the TMR group increased only slightly from about 0.2 to 0.3 nightmares per week, while the average of the group receiving IRT alone increased to 1.5.
Initial findings are promising, but larger studies must follow
The results of the Swiss researchers are promising. However, studies on a larger scale need to follow to make the findings generalisable. The number of participants was too small, and the group of people studied consisted exclusively of 20- to 35-year-olds with nightmare disorder and without mental illness. In addition, the study lacked a control group that wasn’t treated with IRT at all in order to relativise the results.
Commercial sleep trackers can’t yet distinguish sleep stages accurately enough
It’ll be a while before the combination of IRT and TMR becomes widely available as a form of therapy. Even if further, larger studies confirm the results, commercially available sleep trackers currently present an obstacle. The devices on the market so far aren’t able to distinguish sleep stages as accurately as the brain wave measurements used in the study.
However, under clinical conditions in the future, it’s conceivable that it may also benefit people with post-traumatic stress disorder who experience nightmares of the traumatic events. However, this will also require further studies.
Source:
S. Schwartz, A. Clerget and L. Perogamvros. Enhancing imagery rehearsal therapy for nightmares with targeted memory reactivation. Current Biology. Published online October 27, 2022. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.09.032.
Science editor and biologist. I love animals and am fascinated by plants, their abilities and everything you can do with them. That's why my favourite place is always outside - somewhere in nature, preferably in my wild garden.
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