Learning to Turn Down Your Amygdala Can Modify Your Emotions

neurosciencestuff:

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 brain’s emotional hub, the amygdala, which is located deep
in the brain and difficult to reach with typical neurofeedback methods.
This type of activity has typically only been measured using functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is costly and poorly
accessible, limiting its clinical use.

A study published in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry
tested a new imaging method that provided reliable neurofeedback on the
level of amygdala activity using electroencephalography (EEG), and
allowed people to alter their own emotional responses through
self-regulation of its activity.

“The major advancement of this
new tool is the ability to use a low-cost and accessible imaging method
such as EEG to depict deeply located brain activity,” said both senior
author Dr. Talma Hendler of Tel-Aviv University in Israel and The Sagol
Brain Center at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, and first author
Jackob Keynan, a PhD student in Hendler’s laboratory, in an email to Biological Psychiatry.

The
researchers built upon a new imaging tool they had developed in a
previous study that uses EEG to measure changes in amygdala activity,
indicated by its “electrical fingerprint”. With the new tool, 42
participants were trained to reduce an auditory feedback corresponding
to their amygdala activity using any mental strategies they found
effective.

During this neurofeedback task, the participants
learned to modulate their own amygdala electrical activity. This also
led to improved downregulation of blood-oxygen level dependent signals
of the amygdala, an indicator of regional activation measured with fMRI.

In
another experiment with 40 participants, the researchers showed that
learning to downregulate amygdala activity could actually improve
behavioral emotion regulation. They showed this using a behavioral task
invoking emotional processing in the amygdala. The findings show that
with this new imaging tool, people can modify both the neural processes
and behavioral manifestations of their emotions.

“We have long
known that there might be ways to tune down the amygdala through
biofeedback, meditation, or even the effects of placebos,” said John
Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. “It is an exciting
idea that perhaps direct feedback on the level of activity of the
amygdala can be used to help people gain control of their emotional
responses.”

The participants in the study were healthy, so the
tool still needs to be tested in the context of real-life trauma.
However, according to the authors, this new method has huge clinical
implications.

The approach “holds the promise of reaching anyone
anywhere,” said Hendler and Keynan. The mobility and low cost of EEG
contribute to its potential for a home-stationed bedside treatment for
recent trauma patients or for stress resilience training for people
prone to trauma.