Researchers at UC Irvine have identified a key neural pathway in humans that explains how the brain processes feelings of fear and anxiety, a finding that could help scientists unlock new ways to treat mental health disorders.
So how did the researchers identify those key neural pathways? By recording neuronal activity using electrodes inserted into the amygdala and hippocampus of nine people as they watched scenes from horror movies.
Which begs this question: What movies did the clips meant to stimulate the recognition of fear come from?
Actually, the Weekly apologized up front to Jie Zheng, the UCI graduate student who is the study’s first author, in case that is a stupid or inappropriate question given the gravity and implications of her work.
“Not at all,” Zheng replied in an email. “That’s definitely a good question.”
So, can you guess from which movies the series of clips came from that helped researchers understand how the human brain processes fearful information, something that until now had only been mapped in rodents?
According to Zheng, they were …
Zheng and her colleagues’ study, “Amygdala-hippocampal dynamics during salient information processing,” was just published in the journal Nature Communications.
“It is truly remarkable that we can measure the brain dynamics with such precision,” Zheng says in a statement from UCI Communications. “Further, the traffic pattern between the two brain regions are controlled by the emotion of the movie; a unidirectional flow of information from the amygdala to the hippocampus only occurred when people were watching fearful movie clips but not while watching peaceful scenes.”
“Most studies focus on each brain region in isolation,” adds Dr. Jack Lin, a UCI professor of neurology and the senior author. “Our study unifies the varied literature on the roles of the amygdala and hippocampus in emotional processing, with direct evidence that the amygdala first extracts emotional relevance and then sends this information to the hippocampus to be processed as a memory.”
Knowing this is critical to developing new treatment for psychiatric disorders in the era of personalized medicine, according to the researchers.
“This is the first study in humans to delineate the mechanism by which our brain processes fear at the circuitry level,” Lin says. “This has huge implications for treating neuropsychiatric disorders. For example, current drugs available to treat anxiety disorder bind to large areas of the brain, leading to unwanted side effects. Our hope is that we will one day be able to target and manipulate the precise amygdala-hippocampal circuit involved in processing negative emotions while preserving positive ones. This study brings the promise of targeted therapy a step closer.”
Until then, it’d be helpful if Hollywood churns out more movies that scare the bejesus out of us. You know, for our brains. BRAINS!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.