Sleep and Fear

Delphine Oudiette, James W. Antony, and Ken A. Paller, ‘Fear Not: Manipulating Sleep Might Help You Forget’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18 (2014), 3-4.

The very day that I published my previous post, which talked about sleeplessness and its psychological consequences, I checked Trends in Cognitive Sciences and found this article in the January issue. It made me think about Macbeth again.

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Oudiette et al. are interested in whether traumatic memories (such as in the debilitating condition Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) can be ‘attenuated’ by manipulations of sleep. Research suggests that during sleep memories are consolidated (made ‘stronger and more enduring’) when ‘patterns of brain activity are spontaneously reactivated’. It appears to be possible to tinker with these processes. In an experiment on mice that had been trained to associate electric shock with a particular smell, fear responses were heightened after a period of sleep in which the odorant in question had been reapplied. In a slightly different experiment on humans, later fear response was actually lessened when the associated smell was introduced during sleep.
      The authors acknowledge that they are a long way from a therapeutic treatment for traumatic memory like that in the film . However, as they say, interventions during sleep might well be less painful than reliving or facing traumatic experiences, which other therapies often involve. It’s an intriguing idea, however sketchy.

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This made me think of two fictional comparisons. One (a bit of a stretch) was an episode of , which featured Vietnam war special forces troops who had undergone brain surgery that removed their need to sleep. Rather than making them more effective, it caused their brains to gain strange powers (e.g. telekinesis). Without sleep to regulate it, the X-Files writers seem to be saying, the potential of this organ might get out of control.
      The other instance is, as I said above, Macbeth. I quoted these lines in my previous post:

I have almost forgot the taste of fears;
The time has been, my senses would have cool’d
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in’t: I have supp’d full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts
Cannot once start me.

I discussed there how the hero’s lack of sleep is part of his psychological and moral degeneration. The new article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences made me think further about what Shakespeare might be exploring about sleeplessness. Macbeth is deprived of sleep by conscience (although since he claims to hear a voice proclaim that he has ‘murdered’ sleep, there may be supernatural agents involved). Without sleep, he lacks one key way in which to process all the fears and memories of his insecure, murderous reign. The link isn’t all that close or exclusive – there are other reasons, including just simple habituation, why Macbeth has become inured to horror – but they are two prominent parts of his psychological decline.
      This is debilitating. The hero is anxious, restless. Lady Macbeth is not very different: she sleepwalks, restlessly trying to wash out bloodstains. But perhaps, like the X-Files soldiers, Macbeth is released and transformed. He can do terrible thing after terrible thing partly because he never consolidates the effects they are having on him. It’s interesting that he is so specific about his lack of response in . In one of the experiments discussed by Oudiette et al., this is the measure of fear that they use. Shakespeare is interested in the relationship of sleep and fear, and Macbeth is a compelling portrait of one extreme set of causes and effects.

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The more I think about it, the more it seems probable that memory therapy during sleep might happen. The road towards the Lethe pill (standard kit for those in combat zones) or the night-time phobia clinic will surely be littered with terrified mice, and traumatized monkeys, and unanticipated consequences in humans. Ingenuity may yet prevail. As is often the case, the differences between literature and cognitive science, in what they can offer to an understanding of sleep, involve ethics. The scientific experiments arrange clear and controlled versions – you might say, simplified travesties – of what fear is really like. Fictions can set up scenarios that would never be allowed in the laboratory and yet which compose (counter-intuitively, even with the witches and all) more realistic versions of these powerful emotions. But the fictional knowledge (that vexing aspiration again) does not refine into categories, physiological theories, or hopes of therapy. People do keep going back to Macbeth, though, learning from it each time, partly through the implicit, exploratory question it is asking of our understanding of the mind – ‘so, could this be what it would really be like?’.

Charlie Kaufman and Michael Gondry won a screenplay Oscar for this film, which starred Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. It involves a company which can wipe selected memories; Carrey and Winslet play lovers who do not realise that they have had an earlier relationship erased from their minds.
Twenty years ago I was gripped by the first episodes of this science-fiction series, in which two FBI agents pursued paranormal and often extra-terrestrial cases. By the end of its run in 2002 I had lost track; two hundred episodes were rather a lot. The episode in question here is ‘Sleepless’, no. 4 of Season 2.
See what Gertrude says about Hamlet when he is looking at his father’s ghost: ‘And, as the sleeping soldiers in th’ alarm, / Your bedded hair, like life in excrements [i.e. things that grow out – nothing to do with faeces], / Starts up and stands on end’. No lack of fear response there.
E-mail me at rtrl100[at]cam.ac.uk

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