Fear and the Brain

Throughout the world, approximately 800 million people face detrimental mental health conditions on a day-to-day basis.

Of these people, many experience an anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), both of which can be caused primarily by enduring an extreme amount of fear and distress.

Fear is an important emotion in most living organisms and helps them react to danger in order to survive, but to the human mind, it can have negative effects when consistently present.

In the brain, the “fear pathway” uses connections between the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex, all of which are responsible for building memories and processing them. Recent research has dived deeper into the individual responsibilities of these parts of the brain in processing the emotion of fear, especially how neural pathways transmit threat cues that are then evaluated for an appropriate response. It has been suggested that such pathways also control the creation of distressing fearful memories that may subsequently cause the onset of conditions like anxiety and PTSD.

A new study from Linköping University in Sweden found that a specific biological mechanism, involving the interactions of an enzyme called PRDM2 with genes in the brain, could impact nerve cell activity and therefore affect how the brain reinforces fearful memories. Gene expression can also result in a more extreme response to cues associated with fear in the brain. This research may offer further future research into potential connections between anxiety disorders and conditions like alcohol use disorder (AUD).

As more is uncovered regarding the mechanisms of certain brain pathways in response to fear, treatment options to alleviate disorders can be advanced, from psychotherapies to electrical stimulation, improving quality of life for many people affected by fear-based mental conditions.