Experiments on mice confirmed the guess of scientists about, that the strengthening of neural connections between the hippocampus and amygdala is the same mechanism, which is responsible for the formation of a survival mechanism in humans – an associative “memory of fear. ”
Two scientists from the University of California at Riverside found that in a stressful situation, the hippocampus responds to a specific context and encodes it into memory, while the amygdala activates protective functions, including a reaction in the form of fear.
“We have previously assumed that the mechanism of the formation of a protective reaction to experienced irritation is just such,” said Associate Professor of the Department of Biology and lead author of the work, Jun-Hyun Cho, “There was not enough experimental data. In our experiments, we sawthat the associative memory of a person about traumatic events is really formed due to the connection between the hippocampus and the amygdala. This means that artificially weakening this connection can literally “erase” fear from memory. ”
The “memory of fear” is the ability of the brain to help it survive. We remember a situation in which there was a danger, and we avoid similar situations in the future. If a person has survived an accident and received serious injuries in it, then he may be afraid of cars even after recovering physically. During an accident, the brain manages to read and process information from all sensors of the body: eyes, ears, nose. He remembers the scene, the sound of a collision, the smell of smoke and burning plastic. All this information is processed and combined into a single picture – the “context” associated with the traumatic event.
Why break this connection?
In some cases, the protective process of memory of fear becomes uncontrollable. Most often this occurs in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), when the traumatic event was especially scary: war, terrorist attack, major disasters etc. Insignificant details remotely resembling what has been experienced in patients with PTSD can provoke excessive reactions: nightmares or insomnia, increased anxiety, depression – even after many years after the event.
“We hope that our study will help develop therapeutic strategies to suppress fear in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder,” the scientist said.
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