Fear really resides in a different area of the brain than its inhibitory mechanisms

Do you suffer from a phobia? Maybe arachnophobia? Then you know very well that even if you do not feel uneasy when imagining a huge and hairy tarantula in the therapist’s office, you still jump out of the shower screaming upon seeing a tiny spider. Why is it so hard to get rid of a phobia?

Extinguishing the fear response does not consist of erasing the memory of the fear provoking stimuli, but creating new, competitive memory traces. It has been suspected for some time that neuronal brain circuits responsible for extinguishing fear differ from circuits involved in reoccurrence of the fear response. This assumption has finally been experimentally confirmed. Novel experiments, described in PNAS, a prestigious journal of the American National Academy of Sciences, have been conducted by scientists from the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw. This research team was headed by Dr Ewelina Knapska, Dr Jacek Jaworski and Prof. Leszek Kaczmarek.

“Research has been carried out using a special, genetically modified strain of rats developed in the Nencki Institute. As a result we were able to observe the connections between neurons activated in the brains of animals experiencing fear”, explains Dr Ewelina Knapska, head of the Laboratory of Emotions Neurobiology in the Nencki Institute.