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posted by hubie on Friday March 17 2023, @02:36AM   Printer-friendly

In high-risk contexts, a racing heart can make a formerly relaxed mouse nervous:

When you're stressed and anxious, you might feel your heart race. Is your heart racing because you're afraid? Or does your speeding heart itself contribute to your anxiety? Both could be true, a new study in mice suggests.

By artificially increasing the heart rates of mice, scientists were able to increase anxiety-like behaviors — ones that the team then calmed by turning off a particular part of the brain. The study, published in the March 9 Nature, shows that in high-risk contexts, a racing heart could go to your head and increase anxiety. The findings could offer a new angle for studying and, potentially, treating anxiety disorders.

The idea that body sensations might contribute to emotions in the brain goes back at least to one of the founders of psychology, William James, says Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist at Stanford University. In James' 1890 book The Principles of Psychology, he put forward the idea that emotion follows what the body experiences. "We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble," James wrote.

The brain certainly can sense internal body signals, a phenomenon called interoception. But whether those sensations — like a racing heart — can contribute to emotion is difficult to prove, says Anna Beyeler, a neuroscientist at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Bordeaux. She studies brain circuitry related to emotion and wrote a commentary on the new study but was not involved in the research. "I'm sure a lot of people have thought of doing these experiments, but no one really had the tools," she says.

[...] In the new study, Deisseroth and his colleagues used a light attached to a tiny vest over a mouse's genetically engineered heart to change the animal's heart rate. When the light was off, a mouse's heart pumped at about 600 beats per minute. But when the team turned on a light that flashed at 900 beats per minutes, the mouse's heartbeat followed suit. "It's a nice reasonable acceleration, [one a mouse] would encounter in a time of stress or fear," Deisseroth explains.

When the mice felt their hearts racing, they showed anxiety-like behavior. In risky scenarios — like open areas where a little mouse might be someone's lunch — the rodents slunk along the walls and lurked in darker corners. When pressing a lever for water that could sometimes be coupled with a mild shock, mice with normal heart rates still pressed without hesitation. But mice with racing hearts decided they'd rather go thirsty.

[...] Understanding the link between heart and head could eventually factor into how doctors treat panic and anxiety, Beyeler says. But the path between the lab and the clinic, she notes, is much more convoluted than that of the heart to the head.

Journal Reference:
Hsueh, B., Chen, R., Jo, Y. et al. Cardiogenic control of affective behavioural state. Nature 615, 292–299 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05748-8


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2023, @02:48AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2023, @02:48AM (#1296611)

    https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc799207/m2/1/high_res_d/vol20-no3-191.pdf [unt.edu]

    In 1997, Claire Sylvia published a book describing the apparent
    personality changes she experienced after receiving a heart and lung
    transplant at Yale-New Haven Hospital in 1988 (Sylvia and Novak,
    1997). She reported noticing that various attitudes, habits, and tastes
    changed following her surgery. She had inexplicable cravings for
    foods she previously disliked. For example, though she was a health
    conscious dancer and choreographer, upon leaving the hospital she had
    an uncontrollable urge to go to a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant
    and order chicken nuggets, a food she never ate.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2023, @12:34PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2023, @12:34PM (#1296670)

      Everything in there is anecdotal. It would be interesting to find whether their's or other's follow on work supported this.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Friday March 17 2023, @03:01PM

      by Freeman (732) on Friday March 17 2023, @03:01PM (#1296694) Journal

      That reads more like a plot in a sci-fi novel.

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday March 17 2023, @09:53PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Friday March 17 2023, @09:53PM (#1296751)

      She had inexplicable cravings for
      foods she previously disliked. For example, though she was a health
      conscious dancer and choreographer, upon leaving the hospital she had
      an uncontrollable urge to go to a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant
      and order chicken nuggets, a food she never ate.

      I mean, it wouldn't really surprise me to hear that vegetarians/vegans get cravings for a burger every so often. Your body wants meat.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday March 18 2023, @01:04AM

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Saturday March 18 2023, @01:04AM (#1296784) Journal

    Recently, an old alpha-blocker drug (Prazosin, trade name Minipress) has been showing up in my PTSD patients' profiles. Given what this is and one hypothesis of PTSD, that it's partly your brain getting stuck in sympathetic overload, it makes sense: there's a kind of dependency hell going on, where the mind and body can't get out of one anothers' way and calm down. So it makes sense that forcibly damping down catecholamine signalling might help.

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
  • (Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Saturday March 18 2023, @05:48AM

    by ChrisMaple (6964) on Saturday March 18 2023, @05:48AM (#1296818)

    Is "interoception" measured with an interocitor, on this island Earth?

  • (Score: 1) by jman on Saturday March 18 2023, @08:06AM

    by jman (6085) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 18 2023, @08:06AM (#1296836) Homepage
    As a programmer, I am well aware of, some time down the road, the dismay of finding some method I wrote to solve a particular problem at the time, which could have instead been solved by judicious use of a method I'd already written at an earlier time.

    Nice to know evolution contains crufty code as well.

    Or, at least, to know it doesn't fully unit test before rolling out new behavior.
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