What is the difference between extinction and memory reconsolidation?

Unfortunately, people don’t know enough about memory reconsolidation, and they loop it in and think it’s the same as extinction and it’s not. It’s different, if you’re a therapist you’re going to want to know these different mechanisms of change. If you’re just interested in psychology, you might want to know about the different mechanisms of change.

Some change occurs when past memories are changed or healed. For example, let’s take EMDR, EMDR goes back to past memory using bilateral stimulation. It reduces the subjective unit of distress. Essentially how this is working aside from the intervention itself but with your neurons these neural circuits are activated. Synapses are activated and after about five hours it reconsolidates, this happens every time you remember something.

When you remember something, you’re actually remembering the last time you remembered it. This has some sort of use for therapy, we activate a memory we have some sort of intervention like EMDR. It interferes with this memory reconsolidation, there’s other ways to interfere with it such as propranolol. There are studies on that, it’s very interesting. Mismatch, parts and memory therapy, there’s a lot a lot of ways to do it.

EMDR edits the memory, our goal is to affect the implicit memory not so much the explicit, but the memory reconsolidates. So, any sort of past emotional learning such as the fight or flight response, something that was traumatic becomes no longer traumatic. We remove a trigger and something’s no longer triggering. Change occurs by editing the past memory, taking the emotions out. This is different than CBT, this is different than new learning. To simplify things, there’s unlearning and then there’s new learning to counterbalance. New learning like positive affirmations, exposure therapy, learning “oh it is safe it is safe right now I am okay this is okay”, that sort of thing.

Biologically what’s happening is different we have unlearning and then new learning. That’s an oversimplification, yes, but it’s a way to conceptualize what is happening. In one situation where someone has this public speaking event and there’s some sort of fallout, and it’s just an embarrassing thing. Now they think about public speaking and there’s a phobia because of this event, yeah EMDR might be really good for that.

However, there might be another situation where someone has never done public speaking, and they have anxiety about it because they haven’t learned that it’s okay. In this case cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) would be a better fit. So, both have their places, and knowing the source of the symptom and where things are can help you with your patient. One is bottom-up processing the other is top-down.

These are some of the simple differences between memory reconsolidation and extinction. Both methods lead to desensitization and that’s our goal.

If you want to watch this video visit Preston Walker Guides, Differences Between Extinction and Memory Reconsolidation | Mental Health – YouTube