Some 15% of all adults suffer from it every year: anxiety about once again having a negative experience. As a result, they avoid certain types of situations. There are psychological treatments to combat this. “But quite often those treatments don't work straight away, or people end up falling back into their old anxiety patterns afterwards,” Bramson explains. “That is why we need to better understand what happens in the brain of anxious people: why do they develop strong tendencies to avoid certain situations? Those insights can hopefully help us improve anti-anxiety treatments.”
Bramson's research focuses on learning from rewards and punishments, an important process in the brain. “Anxious people have a tendency to overgeneralise negative experiences, to make them bigger than they are,” he says. “Think of people who were once bitten by a dog and have been anxious around dogs ever since, even if a dog shows no sign of aggression, is far away, or is safely behind a fence. The distinction between acute threat and safety is no longer clear to them. As a result, they avoid dogs altogether and therefore never learn that most dogs are harmless. This in turn perpetuates or exacerbates anxiety.”
Experiment
For his research, Bramson was awarded a Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). This grant gives him three years to develop his ideas. Bramson combines brain stimulation with brain imaging. His goal is to discover how deep brain systems influence learning.
In his experiment, Bramson first investigates how healthy people learn from threats and rewards, and will then modulate deep brain systems with ultrasound stimulation. After brain stimulation, participants choose whether to approach or avoid a series of targets. Those targets can either generate money or give a mild electric shock. By varying the proximity to the targets and the predictability of the outcomes, Bramson examines how the brain learns to respond to threats near or far away, in more or less predictable situations.
“I hope this will help me understand how healthy learning can be restored in people suffering from anxiety,” he clarifies. “I want to achieve this by first showing how learning from punishments and rewards works in the brain, and how that process is different in people with high anxiety. Finally, I hope to discover whether we can use brain stimulation to influence learning. If so, brain stimulation could help improve treatments for anxiety and help to break the vicious cycle in people suffering from anxiety. This is important, because when you exhibit persistent avoidance due to anxiety, you also miss out on the opportunity of having positive experiences.”
No computer
Bramson is continuously fascinated by the brain. “It is fascinating to learn about how all these complex neural structures work together. How potential rewards and punishments influence behaviour, and how we make decisions based on earlier experiences, but also on imagined outcomes.” That is why, after completing his degree in Psychology, he decided to pursue a PhD in cognitive neuroscience. “There is something amazing about the brain. Of course things sometimes go wrong, like in Anxiety, but the most impressive feat for me is all the things our brains allow us to do, and that that goes smoothly so often. In my studies I’m continually amazed by how the brain works.”
The brain is often seen as a computer, a comparison of which Bramson is not a fan. “A computer is designed and programmed by humans, and has no objectives of its own. You can teach a computer certain behaviour by using reward, but it does not experience physical threat. If you threaten it with turning off the power, it does not care. The brain on the other hand has developed to keep us alive, and for that purpose it has systems that allow us to pursue rewards, but also systems that can overtake all other processing when you must respond to danger. This makes sense because when you are in mortal peril you better focus on getting away. However, when those systems that are normally used for dealing with occasional threats become dominant or over-active, also in safe situations, as I think happens in the case of anxiety, things go wrong. This can lead to avoidance of situations that should not be avoided. I hope my research will provide a starting point for rebalancing those systems in anxiety.”
Would you like to know more about Bob Bramson's research? Read on...
Photo: Uday Mittal via Unsplash