Mohammed Milad: “Can We Control Anxiety?”

 

On Tuesday October 11th, doctor Mohammed Milad, member of the International Science Council and assistant professor of the Harvard Medical School department of psychology held two lectures at SUSU dedicated to fear. Where the first lecture was mostly dedicated to the nature of this phenomenon, in the second doctor Milad talked about how a person can dull this feeling with the help of medical technology.

“Imagine a situation: you come across a bear. What’s your reaction? Of course, you want to run away. And if the bear is in a cage at the zoo? That’s a completely different situation, there’s no fear, and the bear seems like a cute animal. Fear very much depends on the context,” said Mohammed Milad, beginning his second presentation.

However, there are people who fear bears the same if they are in the wild or in the zoo. Why do people experience fear differently? The Harvard scientist and his team of scientists are attempting to answer this question.

As an experiment, they took 109 people and observed how they reacted to a small electric shock. One third of the group experienced strong fear, one third – a medium amount, and the rest experienced hardly anything. The third group was of most interest to the researchers. Throughout the course of the research it was discovered that the parts of the brain responsible for fear among the “fearless” people differ from the rest of the participants in the experiment. Here we refer to the amygdala, which analyzes information coming from the sense organs, trying to assess threatening situations by summarizing all of this data. When danger is detected, it’s the amygdala that send out a signal. The third group of participants have a weakened amygdala which didn’t send a signal strong enough for the brain to run a full-fledged fear response.

 
 

Not stopping there, the scientists continued their research, this time using transcranial magnetic stimulation in their experiments. A special apparatus which uses magnetic impulses is attached to a person’s head, affecting the cerebral cortex. Typically, TMS is used to heal motor disorders, depression, pain syndromes, Parkinson’s disease, and other illnesses. But Mohammed Milad and his colleagues were able to improve this method. Affecting special parts of the brain, they were able to significantly reduce the feeling of fear in particular situations.

“We are using this method to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. For research, we take particular things that are associated with fear and utilizing stimulation we can dull the subjects’ reaction,” explained the researcher.

In the future, Mohammed Milad will try and improve this method to combat innate fears, such as the fear of death. 

 

Photo by Oleg Igoshin
Contact person: 
Oleg Igoshin
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