Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Direct electrical stimulation of the amygdala enhances declarative memory in humans.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT05065450 (Mechanisms of Amygdala-Mediated Memory Enhancement in Humans), which is not on this map. Cited by 68 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Mechanisms of Amygdala-Mediated Memory Enhancement in Humans
Who cites it
68 citing papers in PubMed, 211 citations in OpenAlex.
- Acute unilateral DBS of the basolateral amygdala does not affect motricity, anxiety-like behavior, or fear memory consolidation in rats.Experimental brain research · 2026Article
- Rhythmic stimulation elicits multiple, concurrent neural responses.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Direct electrical stimulation of the human amygdala enhances recognition memory for objects but not scenes.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Face-name associative memory in temporal lobe epilepsy: Region-specific insights in right-hemisphere onset.Epilepsy research · 2026Article
- Novelty, Ecological Relevance, and Sexual Receptivity Modulate Neuronal Interactions between the Amygdala and Hippocampus.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Frontotemporal bursting supports human working memory.NeuroImage · 2026Article
- Dual targeting of iNOS and Src tyrosine kinase as a superior therapeutic strategy against soman-induced long-term neurotoxicity: multimodal biomarker, imaging, and neurobehavioral outcome analyses.Acta neuropathologica communications · 2026Article
- Mind's eye: Saccade-related evoked potentials support visual encoding in humans.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Impacts of early life adversity on the neurocircuitry of emotional memory in children.Development and psychopathology · 2025Article
- Article
- Can memory mapping via stereo-electroencephalography stimulation predict post-operative memory outcomes? A case report.Journal of neurology · 2025Article
- Human hippocampal reactivation of amygdala encoding-related gamma patterns during aversive memory retrieval.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Human single-neuron activity is modulated by intracranial theta burst stimulation of the basolateral amygdala.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- The case for hemispheric lateralization of the human amygdala in fear processing.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- Closed-loop control of theta oscillations enhances human hippocampal network connectivity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Amygdala stimulation transforms short-term memory into remote memory by persistent activation of atypical protein kinase C in the anterior cingulate cortex.Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Exploring individual differences in amygdala-mediated memory modulation.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Disrupted calcium dynamics and electrophysiological activity in the stratum pyramidale and hippocampal alveus during fear conditioning in the 5xFAD model of Alzheimer's disease.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2025Article
- Context familiarity is a third kind of episodic memory distinct from item familiarity and recollection.iScience · 2024Article
- Why does invasive brain stimulation sometimes improve memory and sometimes impair it?PLoS biology · 2024Article
8 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Emotional events are often remembered better than neutral events, a benefit that many studies have hypothesized to depend on the amygdala's interactions with memory systems. These studies have indicated that the amygdala can modulate memory-consolidation processes in other brain regions such as the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex. Indeed, rodent studies have demonstrated that direct activation of the amygdala can enhance memory consolidation even during nonemotional events. However, the premise that the amygdala causally enhances declarative memory has not been directly tested in humans. Here we tested whether brief electrical stimulation to the amygdala could enhance declarative memory for specific images of neutral objects without eliciting a subjective emotional response. Fourteen epilepsy patients undergoing monitoring of seizures via intracranial depth electrodes viewed a series of neutral object images, half of which were immediately followed by brief, low-amplitude electrical stimulation to the amygdala. Amygdala stimulation elicited no subjective emotional response but led to reliably improved memory compared with control images when patients were given a recognition-memory test the next day. Neuronal oscillations in the amygdala, hippocampus, and perirhinal cortex during this next-day memory test indicated that a neural correlate of the memory enhancement was increased theta and gamma oscillatory interactions between these regions, consistent with the idea that the amygdala prioritizes consolidation by engaging other memory regions. These results show that the amygdala can initiate endogenous memory prioritization processes in the absence of emotional input, addressing a fundamental question and opening a path to future therapies.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.