Be Still My Beating Amygdala

I recently heard a story on NPR about neurocinema, in which scientists take real-time MRI scans of people while they’re watching movies. The goal of the research is to see what works and what doesn't work in a movie, perhaps to eventually create better movies. Here is the transcript to a similar interview.

Anyhow, the part of this interview that fascinated me was when they were talking about the amygdala. Different parts of the brain light up during an MRI depending on the emotion evoked by a particular scene. Love, sorrow, empathy - all light up different parts of the brain. Interestingly, lust, fear, and disgust (and sorrow) all light up the amygdala. According to Dr. David Hubbard (lower down in the interview), the scan cannot distinguish, simply from seeing the amygdala activated, what emotion the subject is feeling.

So what does this mean? I went to a parenting seminar once that talked about how anger is a false emotion – that it’s a reaction to another emotion, be that fear, frustration, disappointment, exhaustion, or several other emotions. Without being able to pinpoint the true emotion, a child will react through any of these emotions with a tantrum. One job of a parent is to help the child identify his/her true emotion to be able to resolve the true underlying issue at hand.

Of course, pinpointing the emotion isn’t only a challenge for children; it’s also an issue for adults. As parents, we may react to a particularly trying situation with anger. And often, other trying situations pile upon those before we have a chance to take a step back to examine the underlying emotion (I mean, it would be great to give ourselves timeouts more often, but then the kids would never get to school on time, never get fed, and the house would be even messier than it usually is). And really, we spend enough time parenting when the kids are awake; do we really want to spend our precious alone time pondering better reactions to stimuli? I know I should do it; but I need to have the bookmark version or refrigerator-magnet-sized list of parenting tools.

But moving beyond parents and children, what about other adults. If it’s true that the amygdala gets a rush of blood when feeling lust, fear, or disgust, could this be the underlying reason that people remain in abusive relationships?

All hope is not lost, however. Another recent story on NPR talked about discovering a protein called stathmin, which was found in high levels in fearful mice. When these mice were genetically modified not to have stathmin, they were no longer fearful of wide-open spaces. Here is the story about that study.

So perhaps, some day in the future, women wishing to leave abusive relationships could get some help. Of course, any product that is produced to remove fears could then eventually be misused (if it is in medicinal form, as opposed to a surgery that realistically would be unaffordable by many abused, and perhaps financially dependent, individuals), so that we have an epidemic of people jumping off buildings or jumping into the bear or lion cages at the local zoo.

Of course, this would also provide plenty of material for movies.