Emotional memories of extraordinarily stressful events cause many mental disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These disorders are traditionally treated by exposure therapy, during which patients are repeatedly exposed to a stimulus that provokes the fear. However, this therapy may elicit adverse emotional responses, and possibly lead to relapse or exacerbation.

Lin Lu's lab found that exposure to the cue related to fear memory during specific sleep stage (slow wave sleep, SWS), reduced fear responses during wakefulness without altering sleep profiles. This procedure overcomes the defects of traditional exposure therapy and makes it possible to treat traumatic stress disorder and other mental illnesses non-invasively and painlessly. This study is highly valued by experts in the field of sleep medicine. The research is  published on SLEEP. Professor Jan Born from University of Tübingen, Germany, has published his comments in the same issue, and he proposed “the idea to use cues during sleep as an anesthesia-like state for cutting out a patient’s bad memories—like tumors to be removed by the surgeon’s scalpel—is highly attractive to behavioral health practitioners, which open up entirely new perspectives on the treatment of psychiatric and behavioral disorders that originate from maladaptive memories.” 

He J, Sun HQ, Li SX, Zhang WH, Shi J, Ai SZ, Li Y, Li XJ, Tang XD, Lu L (2015). Effect of conditioned stimulus exposure during slow wave sleep on fear memory extinction in humans.  Sleep . 38(3):423–431. doi: 10.5665/sleep.4502.