Bruce Ecker, LMFT shares an intimate account of a fateful encounter.
“No discussion of therapeutic memory reconsolidation would be complete without elaborating upon the groundbreaking work of Bruce Ecker, the person most responsible for bringing the neuroscientific concept of memory reconsolidation into the clinical realm.” — Martha Stark, MD, Harvard Medical School Faculty
The night described by Bruce in the video above was on Sunday, November 27, 2005. After traveling home on Monday, very early on Tuesday morning Bruce sent this email to share the “Big news” with his neuroscience search partner, Brian Toomey:
Subject: Big news
From: Bruce Ecker
Date: November 29, 2005 at 5:51:15 AM EST
To: Brian Toomey
References: 84b039fc0511281559i6693f1a7hb4d1857c2bef769f@mail.gmail.com
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=Apple-Mail-20-335453123
Message-Id: 5D9A252E-DC3D-4171-A092-7AB0614245B8@dobt.com
Hi Brian,
…When normally I would have read a novel, I worked on the transformation puzzle intensively. …The good news is that I now know, for sure, what the neural mechanism is. Lying in bed late on Sunday night, a word I had seen in passing in a citation came to the front of my mind: reconsolidation. As we were packing for the return trip on Monday morning I hurriedly googled "neural reconsolidation of memory" and hurriedly downloaded some articles, which I studied on the 6-hour train ride home. Eureka!
I will attach the two articles I've studied. It was only in Oct. 2004 that the article that firmly establishes the mechanism was published, and it's the piece most needed for showing the neural basis of why coherence therapy can bring about lasting change as rapidly and deeply as it does. …Nailing the neural correlate of juxtapositional disconfirmation is a tremendous breakthrough. …
Bruce
[Not mentioned in that email: In response to remembering seeing “reconsolidation,” Bruce jumped up out of bed, went back to the online computer, and came face to face with the Oct. 2004 research article, as he describes in the video.]
