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

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre 

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.