Modulation of emotion and memory via direct brain stimulation in humans.

The speaker will describe recent work examining the effects of direct electrical stimulation to the human amygdala on the autonomic nervous system, emotional experience, and long-term declarative memory. In the first study, they found that amygdala stimulation in epilepsy patients undergoing monitoring of seizures via intracranial depth electrodes elicited immediate and substantial dose-dependent increases in electrodermal activity and decelerations of heart rate, most often without eliciting any subjective emotional response. In a subsequent study, they describe work showing that brief, low-amplitude, direct electrical stimulation of the human amygdala enhances long-term declarative memory without eliciting an emotional response. Taken together, these results show that emotion-related circuitry in the human brain can provoke autonomic and subjective changes in emotion and initiate endogenous memory prioritization processes in the absence of emotional input, addressing a fundamental question and opening a path to future therapies.