Are you the type of person that likes to seek out bad information? Do you want to know what the future holds? Ilya Monosov, Ph.D. is an associate professor of neuroscience, neurosurgery, and biomedical engineering. He and his colleagues at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified the brain regions involved in choosing whether to find out if a bad event is about to happen.
Researchers at Wash U School of Medicine have identified specific areas and cells in the brain that become active when an individual is faced with the choice to learn or hide from information about an unwanted aversive event the individual likely has no power to prevent. The findings, published June 11, 2021, in Neuron, could shed light on the processes underlying psychiatric conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety.
In our modern society, we have access to endless articles about bad news all over the world. Do we search for bad news or not worry about it? Our modern lifestyles could be resculpting the circuits in our brain that have evolved over millions of years to help us survive in an uncertain and ever-changing world.
In 2019, studying monkeys, Monosov laboratory members J. Kael White, Ph.D., then a graduate student, and senior scientist Ethan S. Bromberg-Martin, Ph.D., identified two brain areas involved in tracking uncertainty about positively anticipated events, such as rewards. Activity in those areas drove the monkeys’ motivation to find information about good things that may happen.
But it wasn’t clear whether the same circuits were involved in seeking information about negatively anticipated events. “In the clinic, when you give some patients the opportunity to get a genetic test to find out if they have, for example, Huntington’s disease, some people will go ahead and get the test as soon as they can, while other people will refuse to be tested until symptoms occur,” Monosov said. “Clinicians see information-seeking behavior in some people and dread behavior in others.”
“We found that attitudes toward seeking information about negative events can go both ways, even between animals that have the same attitude about positive rewarding events,” said Jezzini, who is an instructor in neuroscience. “To us, that was a sign that the two attitudes may be guided by different neural processes.”
By precisely measuring neural activity in the brain while the monkeys were faced with these choices, the researchers identified one brain area, the anterior cingulate cortex, that encodes information about attitudes toward good and bad possibilities separately. They found a second brain area, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, that contains individual cells whose activity reflects the monkeys’ overall attitudes: yes for info on either good or bad possibilities vs. yes for intel on good possibilities only.
Understanding the neural circuits underlying uncertainty is a step toward better therapies for people with conditions such as anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, which involve an inability to tolerate uncertainty.
This work is supported by the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant numbers R01MH110594 and R01MH116937 to Monosov, and R01MH106435 and R01MH045573 to Haber; and the McKnight Foundation.
Washington University School of Medicine’s 1,500 faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is a leader in medical research, teaching, and patient care. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.
Credit to the photographer of the image on this page at www.modup.net/.
Interesting