14 DAY TRIAL // A team of experts is currently working on shedding new light on the way the amygdala responds to fear, producing the famous fight-or-flight response in humans.
People involved in this line of research are basically studying ways of modifying the way people respond to fear, which may lead to the creation of soldiers that feel little of this emotion.
Another possible use would be the development of new therapies aimed at treating phobias. But the group is focusing its research on understanding how the mouse brain reacts to hair-raising situations.
The investigation is being conducted by experts at the European Molecular Biology Laboratories (EMBL), who are collaborating closely with colleagues from the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, LiveScience reports.
The research effort has already yielded some interesting results, some of which are published in the September issue of the esteemed scientific journal Neuron.
It may very well be that these conclusions will change the way people looked at fear and its neural circuitry until now. The work was conducted on mice, whose fear-related neural pathways are similar to our own.
The EMBL team developed a type of mice that featured special receptors on the amygdala. This meant that, when a drug was administered, cell populations in the two brain structures stopped functioning.
The group then trained the animals so that they started fearing a sound, that was associated with an electric shock. In mice that had been given the drug, hearing the sound did not result in instant panic.
Generally, when they are terrified, the small rodents quiver and freeze. But mice that had the amygdala cells knocked out of order continued to rear on their hind legs, and actively assess the situation they were in.
The new data seems to indeed suggest that fear is controlled by the amygdala in the human brain as well. This could have great implications for research groups looking into the neurobiology of fear.
The discovery also means that developing means of stimulating or inhibiting the response of neurons associated with freezing responses is now possible.
With time, researchers will become capable of both promoting a fear response in a situation, and also of completely eliminating it.
The practical applications for this are mind-boggling, but don't necessarily put us on a good path.