Advancing the treatment and prevention of addiction by understanding sleep’s basic role for inducing and maintaining maladaptive memory

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Gordon Feld
• Subject Area: Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience ; Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 404679789

Addiction is a difficult to treat psychological condition that leads to great suffering in Germany and the world. The wanting of a drug is related to its action on the brain that mainly effects pleasure which equals a reward signal. Addiction develops, if formerly neutral impressions, for example, the facade of a pub, are connected to the urge to take drugs by reward learning. Therefore, researching reward learning and memory play an essential role to prevent and treat addiction. Sleep stabilizes memory, in deep sleep, by repeatedly replaying memory traces that were learned during the preceding day. It has been shown in young healthy subjects that this process favours the strengthening of rewarded memories. The central research question of the current project is 1. whether sleep plays a role in the development of addiction and 2. whether sleep can be used to treat addiction. To answer these questions the relationship between reward learning and sleep will be investigated in healthy and addicted participants. Initially, the size of the effect of sleep on reward learning will be measured in a typical sample of the population. Next, by sampling addicts undergoing treatment it will be investigated, if they show signs of disturbed sleep and reward learning compared to healthy controls. In another experiment the biological and behavioural basis of the effect of sleep on reward learning will be investigated by asking participants to sleep in a brain scanner and encouraging the replay of memory through the presentation of sounds. Additionally, alcohol addicts will be exposed to the odour of alcohol during sleep, to achieve the goal of deleting their behavioural response to alcohol cues and thereby reducing the probability of relapse. Meanwhile, we will measure the reaction of the brains reward centres to these cues in the brain scanner to investigate the biological basis of treatment effects. The main goal of this project is to identify the fundamental processes of sleep-dependent memory stabilization that contribute to the development and maintenance of addiction. The findings of this project have the potential to fundamentally improve the treatment of addiction by including sleep as a treatment component.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups