The medical community is still learning about the formation and retention of memory. Studies have been on the rise, and new research surfaces regularly. Our brains have long-term memory, short-term memory, the process for storing memories and of locating and retrieving memories from the places where they are stored, which scientists now believe to be vast. Consider that for decades, neuroscientists believed that memories were stored in the synapses that connect our brain cells and not in the brain cells (or neurons) themselves. Now they have disproved this and believe it’s the neurons that hold our history. We have also discovered that memories are not static. In fact, they change every single time we pull them from storage.
The treatment used to induce limited anterograde amnesia of traumatic events was found through a series of trials on both animals and humans over many years and in many variations. It starts with morphine. As early as the 1950s, doctors noticed a reduction in PTSD from the early administration of morphine in high doses. The findings were inadvertent—the morphine had been administered to children who were victims of burning following a fire, purely for the intention of pain relief. Those who received the higher doses immediately after the fire had noticeably reduced symptoms of PTSD than the children who received less or no morphine. In 2010, a formal paper was written confirming the benefits of morphine for children suffering from burns. Morphine, along with other drugs, has been used for years to treat soldiers in the field, and researchers correlating records of trauma, morphine, and PTSD have found that high doses administered immediately after a trauma can significantly reduce PTSD in wounded men and women.
This is why: Every waking moment, we have experiences. We see, feel, and hear. Our brains process this information and store it in our memories. This is called memory consolidation. Each factual event also carries some emotional counterpart, and that triggers chemicals in the brain and those chemicals then place the events into the appropriate file cabinet, if you will. Things that capture our emotions are filed in the locked metal cabinets. They are not replaced by subsequent events and can be easily recalled. Other less provocative events, what we made for dinner last Thursday, might go into a manila folder somewhere. As time passes, these will get buried under other manila folders and at some point become impossible to find. They may even get sent to the shredder. Some researchers believe that morphine reduces the emotional reaction to an event by blocking norepinephrine so a “metal cabinet” event may get reduced to a “manila folder” event. This is the first component of the treatment.
Now, because the filing of any event requires the interaction of chemicals in the brain, you can see how interfering with those chemicals while they are trying to do their filing could interrupt the process. This is why a night of binge drinking results in a “blackout.” It’s also why drugs like Rohypnol (the date rape drug) enable a person to function “normally” but not remember anything that happened while the drug was in the system. The brain’s filing staff is on a break. Nothing gets filed, and the events are presumably lost, as if they never happened. But this is during the short-term-memory phase. The second part of the treatment involves a revolutionary drug that claims to send the filers on their break during the consolidation of long-term memory—it stops the synapses from working at this stage by inhibiting necessary proteins, so the short-term memories are discarded. They call it Benzatral.
The tricky part with trauma is the timing. There is no exact time between short-term- and long-term-memory consolidation. Every memory involves different parts of the brain, depending on what the memory is made of. Was it a sight, a sound, a feeling? Was it music or math or meeting a new person? The brain is functioning while the trauma is occurring, so the filing is in process. The treatment has to be given within hours of the trauma, and even then it may not be completely effective if some of the events have already made it to long-term storage.
Jenny had the perfect set of circumstances. She was already inebriated when the rape began. She went into shock during the attack. Within half an hour, she was given a sedative. And within two hours, the treatment was administered. She awoke twelve hours later with only the small bits and pieces I have already mentioned.
Tom Kramer also recalled the conversation in the family lounge. I cannot fully capture the emotion with which he recounted it, so I will just give you his words and tell you that he did not cry. I think by this point he had no more water.