News / Health & Wellness
Memory Training to Fight Addiction
Can an addict’s brain be trained to value future consequences of drug use as a way to help treat addiction?
In adults addicted to stimulants, a phenomena known as “delay discounting” greatly decreases their ability to see those future consequences. But now a new study shows that neurocognitive training that targets working memory can significantly reduce "delay discounting" in adults addicted to stimulants.
Cognitive Training
In a randomized trial, participants who received the training through use of memory exercises decreased their rates of future reward discounting by an average of 50 percent while the rates were not significantly changed for those who received control training.
It doesn’t just work with those battling an addiction, though. Investigators note that neurocognitive rehabilitation approaches have been shown to improve executive function in patients with schizophrenia and traumatic brain injury, too.
"This is the first study to demonstrate that memory training decreases delay discounting. The ability of the people in our experimental group to value the future improved," lead study author Warren K. Bickel, PhD, professor and director of the Center for Substance Abuse at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute in Roanoke, told Medscape Medical News.
"We know that virtually every form of addiction demonstrates an inability to value the future, which affects numerous behaviors and can also predict how well people do in treatment," said Dr. Bickel.
"In addition, there has been an increasingly large body of data coming forward suggesting that addicts may have less than adequate functioning in their prefrontal cortices. Given that, we decided to use training techniques that historically have been used to improve those areas of executive dysfunction," he explained.
While much more research will need to be conducted, this could lead to cognitive training becoming an important tool in ending the hijacking of imagination by drugs of abuse.
This study was conducted while Dr. Bickel was at the Center for Addiction Research and the Center for the Study of Tobacco Addiction at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.
A total of 27 adults (65 percent male; mean age, 38.6 years) in a treatment facility for abuse of stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine were randomized to receive either experimental or control memory training. The experimental training consisted of several working memory tasks with monetary rewards based on performance. These tasks included repeated sequenced recalls of numbers, reversed numbers and words.
Those receiving the control training underwent the same exercises but with no memorization required, and the monetary rewards were random and independent of their performance.
Results showed that memory training significantly decreased the rates of discounting future rewards.
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