“These cells are probably just one part of an extended circuit by which the animal learns about anxiety-related information,” said neuroscientist and lead researcher Mazen Kheirbek, who plans to pursue the study further. Perhaps one day in the future, conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder could become as treatable as turning a light switch on and off.
What About Us?
Another experiment, performed at University of Waterloo in Canada looked at anxiety levels in 80 different students who were categorized as having either high or low anxiety, though all at levels they could manage. They were shown words that flashed across a computer screen, superimposed on random images, and then quizzed on the words they could remember. While the high- and low-anxiety groups seemed to recall similar numbers of words, the researchers noticed that the high-anxiety group was actually better at recalling words superimposed on the more bleak images — pictures of car wrecks or burning buildings, for example.
“Their memories were more emotionally tinted,” says professor of psychology Myra Fernandes, who co-authored the study, “and as a result rendered more memorable.” While anxious people may have an advantage with memory over their less anxious peers, there is a caveat. If you have too much anxiety, your mood can also affect the way you perceive day-to-day events.
Therefore, Fernandes suggests being mindful of the biases you bring to the table when you live your day-to-day life — try to observe what is happening around you if you find yourself looking too far inward. Keeping a journal in which you simply list events that happened throughout your day can help us to look objectively, even helping to remember some of the things we accomplished more smoothly.
The constant fear of predators likely stole sleep from our ancestors — and even though we have moved from the grasslands, the problem of sleep deprivation plagues us today. Nearly one-third of the population is thought to suffer from what the World Health Organization has described as a catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic. Around 31 percent of the American and Canadian population falls into this statistic.
With an eventful workweek, it may seem like second nature to lose a few hours of sleep, but our brains take a toll that we may not realize. The more tired your brain is, the more difficult it is to assess an ordinary situation from a threatening one. You might attribute feeling tired after work to crunching numbers all day, but working longer hours and sleeping fewer hours actually leaves you vulnerable to more negative emotional states.
With sleep deprivation, the connectivity of the amygdala to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is weakened. The amygdala initiates a fear response but cannot act without the approval of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Connectivity between the insula and the amygdala are increased, magnifying the fear response. As basic as it sounds, getting a minimum of seven to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep is crucial — for much more than we realize. Just getting back those few extra hours each week can be the difference that push us to go the extra mile — to chase after the dream job or apartment that we never thought we could get, rather than to just play it safe and keep our deepest fears at bay.
This article was originally published in Brain World Magazine’s Summer 2018 issue.
