Washington University School of Medicine
The objective is to understand how amygdala activation affects other medial temporal lobe structures to prioritize long-term memories. The project is relevant to disorders of memory and to disorders involving affect and memory, including traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Direct electrical stimulation (DES) of the basolateral complex of the amygdala (BLA) can improve declarative memory, reflecting the role of the BLA in modulating memory processes in medial temporal lobe (MTL) regions as a function of emotional arousal. Thus, DES can reveal mechanisms of BLA-mediated memory enhancement relevant to human mental health and disease. DES of the BLA can be used to interrogate the function of memory circuits, especially how neuronal oscillations in the MTL support declarative memory. First, BLA is hypothesized to wield the capacity to prioritize long-term retention o…
Inclusion Criteria: * Must be able to understand and speak English. * Able to provide informed consent. * Diagnosed with epilepsy. * Scheduled to undergo long-term intra-cranial video monitoring for seizure onset localization. * Must be implanted with intracranial depth electrodes to the left or right amygdala, hippocampus, and parahippocampal/perirhinal cortices. Exclusion Criteria: * Unable to understand and speak English. * Unable to provide informed consent. * Not diagnosed with epilepsy.
Electrodes localized to the BLA will be stimulated with either active-BLAES (0.5-3.5 mA, theta-modulated gamma burst) electrical stimulation for a 1-sec duration immediately following item image presentation or sham-BLAES (zero-amplitude). At later stages of the project, stimulation parameters and timing will be varied and triggered not at random, but by real-time closed-loop analysis of memory biomarkers in the medial temporal lobe.
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