Sarah Fleming (https://www.flickr.com/photos/smercury98/2684073750/in/photostream/) CC-by-2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
Scientists have recently been studying the causes of anxiety as they are reflected in the brains of laboratory mice, and they believe that they’ve located the source of anxious feelings, along with a potential way to treat them!
By studying mice brains as the mice make their way through mazes, portions of which are known to cause the mice to feel anxious, the scientists can pinpoint which parts of the brain contains cells that become active when the mice are anxious.
They’ve also developed a way to shine light onto those cells and reduce the anxiety that these anxious mice are feeling. This could lead to breakthroughs for the treatment of human anxiety disorders as well!
To read more, check out this article summarizing the research, or this article presenting their results more fully (requires access to the database).
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