“Deep brain electrodes capture neurons firing millisecond by millisecond, revealing in real time how the brain attends to fearful stimuli,” said Jie Zheng, a UCI graduate student.
Researchers demonstrated that these two regions, nestled deep in the centre of the brain and which play a key role in recognising emotional stimuli and encoding them in memories, are directly exchanging signals.
“In fact, neurons in the amygdala fired 120 milliseconds earlier than the hippocampus. It is truly remarkable that we can measure the brain dynamics with such precision,” said Zheng.
“The traffic pattern between the two brain regions are controlled by the emotion of the movie; a unidirectional flow of information from the amygdala to the hippocampus only occurred when people were watching fearful movie clips but not
while watching peaceful scenes,” Zheng said.
