Daily Mail Science Editor Michael Hanlon underwent an MRI scan to locate his 'anxiety centre' and determine his basic stress levels.
Great question: Scientists are trying to work out what causes anxiety, a complex phenomenon and a poorly understood one
This is not good. I am laid out on a hard narrow stretcher, my head locked into place by blocks and padding, plugs in my ears.
Behind me, a humming MRI scanner - into the maw of which I am about to be wheeled. On my tummy digs a painful wooden box, from which protrudes a large rubber prong.
It is all getting a bit Abu Ghraib. My mouth is dry. It cannot get any worse, surely. But it does. The man in charge ambles towards me with a pair of electrodes and a tube of KY Jelly, a miserable combination.
'What are they for?' I ask. 'To electrocute your foot.' Ah, will it hurt? 'A bit.' 'Can you feel it?' No - 'take it up a level'... ow... OW!...
Finally, goggles are placed over my eyes and I am slid into a long, dark and, svelte as I’m not, extremely cramped tunnel.
'Some people start hyperventilating' I was informed beforehand. Happily I am not claustrophobic. Time for the fun and games to begin.
I am taking part in an ingenious experiment designed to answer one of the great unanswered questions in neuroscience, namely where exactly in the brain do the feelings of anxiety and terror (and indeed well-being and calm) arise?
The experiment is being run by Dr Adam Perkins, a psychologist at the world-leading Maudsley Hospital in south London.
And after nine months of stressing out a group of volunteers (including Dr Perkins himself) the scientists have now concluded they have spotted the ‘anxiety centre’, in the hippocampus, a region of the brain inside the medial temporal lobe and more usually associated with memory and spatial awareness.
It is the hippocampus which lights up like a firework when placed in the artificially stressful situation of this bizarre experiment.
The brain scans are now being analysed and combined with data from test questionnaires, designed to assess a person’s basic anxiety levels. The hope now is that the knowledge will lead to the development of new drugs and therapies to treat anxiety disorders and depression.
Very anxious people tend to ‘freeze’ when faced with a difficult task, a phenomenon known as ‘behavioural inhibition’. Discovering why some people literally go rigid with fear when faced with potential danger (or even pretend danger, such as this experiment is designed to generate), while others calmly react to the threat and deal with it (and what is happening in their brains while they do so) is key to understanding anxiety in humans.
Into the void: Michael Hanlon has a MRI scan on his brain to test his responses to anxiety at the Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences in Camberwell, south London
Anxiety is a complex phenomenon, and a poorly understood one.
'Up to now it has been a rather abstract concept,' Dr Perkins says. 'We are turning anxiety into a behaviour we can measure.'
To do this, you have to make people anxious. The heart of the Maudsley study is a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine, one of those mega-expensive doughnut-shaped scanners which in the last few years have revolutionised our knowledge of the brain’s workings.
Unlike a conventional MRI scanner, which takes static ‘snapshots’ of your insides, the fMRI, as its name suggests, actually ‘sees’ the brain in action, scanning not only its internal structure but showing the patterns of electrochemical activity which correspond to thoughts, feelings and emotions.
It is, in essence, an electronic mind-reader which uses powerful magnets and computers to generate images of the mind in action.
Right-wing people tend to be rather more anxious than left-wing people, elderly liberal men the least anxious of all
To be honest, just being wheeled into this device is bad enough. With all the extra gizmos, I only just squeeze in. To get a precise measure of what is going on in my skull I am given a task, the nub of this experiment.
Through the goggles I can see a projection of a computer screen. The rubber prong, which I can just about hold with my arms wedged into the core of the scanner, is a joystick. I start playing a video-game.
It is called ‘Ratrace’ and is simple enough - no fancy graphics, more ‘Space Invaders’ than ‘Doom’.
I have to control a little green dot which is moving along a ‘runway’. Specifically, I have to use the joystick to alter its speed and avoid colliding with the little red evil dots that are chasing me or getting in my way.
If they do hit, usually nothing happens. But sometimes I feel the little stab of electric unpleasantness on my foot. After a few minutes of this, my arms, already tingling thanks to the magnetic field, start to cramp and I am thinking I can do without the shocks.
Eventually I am wheeled out to hear how I have done. I am surprised with the results.
We all suffer from anxiety to an extent, but with tremendous variation.
Women, it turns out, are (on average) far more anxious than men; not only are they more likely to be terrified by physical threats but also abstract things like walking into a crowded room or even choosing a mortgage or new wallpaper.
Female subjects have, generally, done ‘badly’ in the Ratrace fMRI test. The old, contrary to popular belief, tend to be less anxious than the young.
Monitoring: Radiographer Caroline Andrews analyses Michael's brain while he is inside the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine, which actually 'sees' the brain in action
The experiment is designed to answer one of the great unanswered questions in neuroscience, namely where exactly in the brain do the feelings of anxiety and terror (and indeed well-being and calm) arise?
More surprisingly again, anxiety corresponds strongly with political beliefs. In short, right-wing people tend to be rather more anxious than left-wing people, elderly liberal men the least anxious of all.
'Conservatives are more sensitive to perceived threats, such as immigration,' Dr Perkins says.
'We think of anxiety as something bad but of course it has evolved for a reason - a way of evaluating possible danger.
'A normal level of anxiety is very good. It stops you being reckless.'
For some jobs, lower-than-average anxiety is a must. The armed forces spend millions of pounds on training people for elite roles such as bomb disposal or the SAS. Only to find that a large proportion of recruits, although fit, strong and able, simply go to pieces when faced with real stress.
In fact, actual war is so terrifying that in WW2 most of the allied servicemen who suffered nervous breakdowns never even made it into combat.
No wonder the MoD is hugely interested in this work, as now there is a potential tool to weed out recruits that simply will not be able to hack the extreme stress of their desired roles.
Too little anxiety is bad too. While a bomb disposal expert has to keep his cool in situations that would leave most people frozen in abject terror, being too laid-back - 'red wire, blue wire?... what the hell...' - would clearly be fatal.
'Ideally you want a low level of anxiety coupled with a high level of conscientiousness and high intelligence,' Dr Perkins says.
Anxiety can strike in different ways. America’s most decorated soldier in WW2 was a slightly-built, baby-faced eight-stone Texan farmboy called Audie Murphy. As a teenager Murphy was painfully shy, and throughout his life, he had a terror of public appearances and especially public speaking, the prospect of which could reduce him to jelly.
During his examination Michael played Ratrace, a simple game in which he had to control a little green dot moving along a 'runway'
But in battle Audie Murphy was a superman. On one occasion, during a firefight in France, outnumbered six-to-one and hastily promoted to lieutenant, he ordered his surviving men to fall back then climbed onto a burning tank and single-handedly killed dozens of German troops with its machine gun. In Italy, after seeing a friend shot dead, he flew into a rage and destroyed an entire German gun crew. Yet when he returned to a hero’s welcome he often ‘choked’ when invited to give a speech.
So what about me? I have never thought of myself as a particularly anxious person - I don’t get stressed in crowds and have no phobias (two classic indicators for an anxious personality) but I am a physical coward; I have little interest in adrenaline sports and I certainly wouldn’t last a millisecond under real torture.
I was surprised, then, to be told I did well on the test and was less bothered than most by the electric shocks.
In my anxiety questionnaire (in which subjects are asked to rate how scary they find things such as public speaking and spiders) I scored much better than average. 'Actually, you score like a person taking anti-anxiety drugs,' I was told.
However, my answers to questions regarding purely physical threats put me back into the normal category.
I could no more take on the Wehrmacht than swim to the Moon but, unlike Audie Murphy I have no problems with public speaking. The worst combination, apparently, is a combination of extremely low anxiety levels and ‘dubious morality’ - the stuff of serial killers and psychopaths.
Fortunately, or perhaps not, we are a long way from being able to scan potential troublemakers to see if they have the makings of a killer.
But the more we learn about the brain, and especially the more we learn what an abnormal mind looks like on a computer screen, the day when we can spot a psychopath with the aid of a video games and a scanner may one day be upon us.
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