Functioning With Symptoms of OCD: How We Do It

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People with OCD may function well enough, despite their symptoms, by using the strategies of a flexible brain mechanism called declarative memory.

Engaging declarative memory allows those with OCD to control, to some degree, their compulsions. It also lets people with Tourette syndrome manage their tics, and Individuals with autism to learn behavioral scripts for social situations.

Recalling Facts and Events

Our declarative, or explicit memory is one part of our long-term memory function. The other part is called implicit, or procedural memory.

Knowing what has happened, and remembering facts, is the job of declarative memory. We consciously recall information stored there. Declarative memory involves our brain’s hippocampus, but the memories are “stored” in the temporal cortex and other areas.

Procedural memory is the unconscious recall of how to do things—our skills. It primarily involves movements of the body (e.g., riding a bike, tying shoelaces), and is encoded in motor control regions of the brain.

Helpful Strategies, New Treatments

Our declarative memory is amazingly flexible since it learns things both consciously and non-consciously. This makes it able to acquire a variety of compensatory strategies, and fill in for impaired brain systems. These declarative strategies are what people with OCD or Tourette syndrome may use to manage their symptoms.

Although declarative memory can step in for impaired brain functions, it cannot do these functions as well. So, people with disorders such as OCD usually have noticeable difficulties despite the declarative memory help. However, knowing how our memory steps in to assist may lead to improved treatment methods.

Creating treatments that engage declarative memory may increase the compensation that declarative memory provides. Conversely, developing treatments that avoid using the declarative system might improve the functioning of impaired brain systems, and maybe reduce symptoms.

Hypothetical Possibilities

The same declarative memory mechanism that helps those with OCD might also assist people with ADHD, aphasia (cannot express using speech), and Parkinson’s disease. Research into the declarative function may have diagnosis and treatment implications for various disorders.

Though still a hypothesis, the role of declarative memory in OCD is based on decades of research. This hypothesis is proposed by a neuroscientist at Georgetown University Medical Center and will be published in the Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews in April.

Sources: Eurekalert; Human Memory
Photo credit: Casey Muir-Taylor / flickr creative commons

 
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