amygdala tagged posts

Shifting from a high-pressure mindset to a curious one improves people’s memory.

New research from Duke found that people who imagined being a thief scouting a virtual art museum in preparation for a heist were better at remembering the paintings they saw, compared to people who played the same computer game while imagining that they were executing the heist in-the-moment.

These subtle differences in motivation—urgent, immediate goal-seeking versus curious exploration for a future goal—have big potential for framing real-world challenges such as encouraging people to get a vaccine, prompting climate change action, and even treating psychiatric disorders.

The findings appeared online July 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Alyssa Sinclair, Ph.D...

A Duke University research team has found a small area of the brain in mice that can profoundly control the animals’ sense of pain.

Somewhat unexpectedly, this brain center turns pain off, not on. It’s also located in an area where few people would have thought to look for an anti-pain center, the amygdala, which is often considered the home of negative emotions and responses, like the fight or flight response and general anxiety.

“People do believe there is a central place to relieve pain, that’s why placebos work,” said senior author Fan Wang, the Morris N...

View of synapses in the amygdala of a mouse, obtained using a confocal microscope. mGlu4 receptors in red, and mGlu1a receptors in green. The white bar bottom right corresponds to 5 ?m. Credit: Zussy et al., 2016

Pain serves as a valuable warning signal, but when it becomes chronic, pain should be considered as a real disease. An international team including research scientists from the CNRS and INSERM has identified and controlled one of the centers associated with chronic pain. This work, published on 20 December 2016 in Molecular Psychiatry, made it possible to relieve the symptoms in mice and demonstrated the ability of the brain to remedy this problem.

While around 20% of the European population has experienced episodes of chronic pain, treatments are only effective in fewer than half...

The amygdala of the human brain is placed somewhat strategically at dorsomedial part (above and inside) of temporal lobe, anteriorly (in front) of the hippocampus and close to the tail of the caudate nucleus.

Training the brain to treat itself is a promising therapy for traumatic stress. The training uses an auditory or visual signal that corresponds to the activity of a particular brain region, called neurofeedback, which can guide people to regulate their own brain activity. However, treating stress-related disorders requires accessing the amygdala that is difficult to reach with typical neurofeedback methods. This activity has only been measured using fMRI, which is costly and poorly accessible.

“The major advancement of this new tool is the ability to use a low-cost and accessible imag...