Terrifying tremors make the brain react more to fear

According to a new study on the brain, even those who seem to recover soon but are close to the World Trade Center when the twin towers collapsed on September 11, 2001, there was a brain reacting to the effects. Emotional stimuli are more than those who are more than 200 miles away from that area.

That's the discovery of a new Cornell University study that excludes people who don't have mental disorders like Psychological Posture (PTSD) or depression. One of the first studies to investigate the impact of injury on the brain of healthy people was published in the May issue of Emotion magazine .

Elise Temple, co-author and associate professor of human development research at Cornell, said: 'These people seem to be fine, but they are actually having sensitive reactions to the agent. discomfort. '

According to other studies, more than half of the population suffers from trauma, which makes them more susceptible to psychological trauma, depression, anxiety and physical illness in later life. At the same time, trauma has been found to make the emotional processing centers of the brain - especially the almonds, parts of the brain function to judge the intensity of emotions and create emotional memories. - more sensitive in the case of psychological aftershocks.

The explosion of the twin towers in the US on September 11, 2001 (Photo: Search.com)

The findings suggest shocking, frightening and terrifying events in a normal range can cause changes in the brain. The victim has long-term symptoms (nightmare, startling, thinking about passing and avoiding the place of injury) but these symptoms are not serious. However, researchers suspect that these types of trauma changes in the brain cause the possibility of future mental disorders.

Specifically, Cornell researchers discovered: 3 years after the September 11, 2001 event, the almonds of those near the World Trade Center became extremely sensitive. These individuals tend to still experience prolonged symptoms that are not serious enough to be diagnosed as a type of mental disorder. People with prolonged symptoms exhibit significantly more sensitive emotional reactions in the brain when stimulated by images of fearful faces.

Leading the study of Barbara Ganzel, the Master of Science in 1999 and the 2002 Doctor of Cornell, a postdoctoral researcher on human development at Cornell said: 'Our research shows : There are long-term neurological correlations when traumatized even in people who look very quickly to recover. Until now, there is still little evidence of that. '

Use the magnetic resonance imaging method to see how the human brain responds with photos of frightened faces compared to calm faces, scans of 11 people from the World Trade Center in Round 1.5 miles on September 11, 2001, compared to those who were more than 200 miles away at that time, none of them had a mental disorder.

Dr. Ganzel said: 'We know that looking at frightened faces for normal adults tends to activate the almonds involved in looking at neutral faces. So we are looking into whether people who have had a very bad experience are more responsive to this relatively smooth, familiar stimulus. '

Indeed, the almonds of people near the twin towers were significantly more active than others' almonds even when other factors were adjusted in the analysis.

Temple says: 'People who experience trauma that have left them with long-lasting symptoms are those with higher activity in the centers of fear. We think the World Trade Center event is enough to cause injury to leave them with 'hyperactive' almonds. '

Other co-authors of the study include BJ Casey, Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychophysics at Weill Cornell School of Medicine, Henning Voss, a physicist at the CitiGroup Biomedical Photography Center in New York City, and Gary. Glover from Stanford University - who developed the fMRI techniques that have been applied.

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