Posts Tagged ‘amygdala’
You could say that some people feel the need to pet any dog, cat or other animal they see on the street, while others simply startle appear on the screen to see a shark or a snake.
Whether you belong to the first group, and the second as the space between them, their reaction to the animals is based largely on a specific region of your brain that is prepared to rapidly detect non-human creatures. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) enrolled 41 patients with epilepsy in Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Read the rest of this entry »
Why some people are concerned about the most trivial subjects while others remain calm before a calamity? A team of scientists has identified two different factors in our brain circuitry that explain why some people are more prone to anxiety.
It was discovered in this research that may pave the way for more focused treatment of anxiety disorders and chronic fear. Such disorders affect many people in the world in the U.S. alone are at least 25 million people. Symptoms include panic attacks, social phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress.
The study’s authors, University of California at Berkeley, and Cambridge University have discovered two different neural pathways that play a role in the processes leading to develop a fear or overcome. Read the rest of this entry »
The amount of friends could be predicted by the size of our amygdala, a part of the brain in the form of small almond. So says an article published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Thanks to previous studies, it is known that the amygdala is involved in personal issues such as the interpretation of emotional facial expressions, visual or react to threats in the trust given to strangers.
Comparisons between different species of nonhuman primates have shown previously that amygdala volume is associated with the number of individuals in the group, suggesting that this region of the brain supports the skills needed for complex social life.
Based on these results, the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, has studied whether it also the case in humans. To that end, his team measured the volume of the amygdala in 58 healthy adults, using brain scans taken during MRI sessions and asked for specifics about the social networks to which they belonged. Read the rest of this entry »