Experts have revealed the secrets of memory and anxiety

The experiments involved people with epilepsy who, for medical reasons, had special microelectrodes installed in their brains. This allowed the researchers to observe the activity of deep brain regions such as the amygdala and hippocampus, which play a key role in emotional memory.

The participants were shown images of household appliances — a toaster, a hair dryer, and a washing machine. Sometimes the image was followed by an unpleasant stimulus: a scream or a frightened face. But gradually, some of the devices stopped being “dangerous,” and the researchers looked at how the brain rearranged its reactions.

It turned out that the neurons of the amygdala reacted not only to the threat, but also to new security signals. And the prefrontal cortex formed more accurate maps of the contexts in which the danger disappeared. This allowed the participants to realize that the toaster was safe in the here and now, but the memory of fear did not disappear completely.

Interestingly, if the context maps were too different, the effect disappeared in a new situation — a person could stop being afraid of an object in one place, but feel fear again in another. Scientists call this the return of fear.

Such observations help to understand why phobias and anxiety disorders are so difficult to treat: the brain stores several parallel memories of fear and security, which can interfere with each other.

As a next step, the researchers plan to transfer experiments to more natural environments using virtual reality technologies, where they can create live contexts and observe how the brain adapts to a changing situation.

The conclusion is simple: fear can be retrained, but old memories do not disappear completely. The brain creates new memory traces that suppress old fears rather than erase them. Understanding these processes can lead to new effective ways to combat phobias and anxiety.