Combating the powerful emotions can increase the quality of life

Jul 7, 2009 22:01 GMT  ·  By
The newly identified fear storage center may help experts develop cures against anxiety, phobias and PTSD, among other conditions
   The newly identified fear storage center may help experts develop cures against anxiety, phobias and PTSD, among other conditions

Researchers have known for quite some time now the basic mechanisms associated with fear, as in what triggers it, and how it is encoded in the brain. But now, a new line of investigations has revealed the exact location in the brain where the feeling is stored, and the region is called the amygdala. The experiments that led to this conclusion were carried out on rats – which have a similar brain structure to our own – by experts at the University of Washington, with the help of a technique that allowed them to go along the nerve path that fear followed when an object associated with the feeling was shown to the unsuspecting rodents.

Understanding the exact mechanisms that fear employs in humans is crucial for potentially devising a number of treatments for conditions such as human phobias, the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other anxiety disorders, which can affect an individual for life. PTSD, for example, is very dangerous, as evidenced by the fact that soldiers returning from conflict zones suffer a great deal because of it. This also reflects on their families, and the men and women fresh off the front lines need to undergo expensive treatments and therapy in order to regain some control over their emotions.

The amygdala and the dorsal hippocampus were, until now, the prime suspects that researchers had when it came to discovering the exact places in the brain where various cues combined to form fear memories. This type of memories is involuntarily called out every time similar circumstances to those that formed them are presented to the individual. This is generally considered to be a self-preservation and safety mechanism, with the purpose of avoiding the organism suffering any damage. Details of the find appear in the July 6th issue of the Public Library of Science's journal PLoS ONE.

“Fear learning and taste aversion learning are both examples of associative learning in which two experiences occur together. Often they are learned very rapidly because they are critical to survival, such as avoiding dangerous places or toxic foods,” UW Professor of Psychology Ilene Bernstein, the corresponding author of the new study, says.

“People have phobias that often are set off by cues from something bad that happened to them, such as being scared by a snake or being in a dark alley. So they develop an anxiety disorder. By understanding the process of fear conditioning we might learn how to treat anxiety by making the conditioning weaker or to go away. It is also a tool for learning about these brain cells and the underlying mechanism of fear conditioning,” she concludes.