I’m a pretty voluble guy.  I love to run around and be involved, talk with strangers, get excited, etc.  Until there is a crisis- which is when I become (at least for me) unnaturally quiet, focused, and dedicated to solving the issue(s).  (My ex-wife was stupefied the first time she was presented with my reaction to a major crisis- she had expected a completely different scenario.)

It turns out how we react to crises may be hard-wired into us.  Because we have found that mice have a “switch”,  a portion of the brain that defines whether we respond to crises with resilience or defeat, and it is related to mood and anxiety disorders.   (That same portion of the brain is also involved with decision-making and memory retrieval.)

Dr. Minghui Wang, Zinaida Perova, and Bo Li (senior author) of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories and Dr. Benjamin Arenkiel (Baylor College of Medicine) published the results of their studies in the Journal of Neuroscience.   Wang, Perova, and Li enhanced neural activity in the medial prefrontal cortex in mice that resisted attempts to avoid electric shocks.  And, found that some of the mice stopped seeking an opened escape route and cowered in the corner, accepting the electrical shocks.

It seems that this neural action left them bereft of hope, believing nothing they would do would change their circumstances.  As if they were depressed and, therefore, unable to avoid or correct their circumstances.  (Note that we do not have an animal mimic of depression- we can only find animals that exhibit the behaviors of despair or helplessness.)

We already knew that helplessness can be learned.  Dr. Martin Seligman and Steven Maier published their seminal results (1967) in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.   Using dogs, these researchers showed that helplessness can be a learned behavior.  And, Seligman expanded this into a theory of helplessness, when an animal or human believes that outcomes cannot be controlled and, therefore, refuses to take actions to avoid the problem- despite the clear and evident escape route.  (He actually developed programs to insure that this would not become learned behavior for the US Army.  And, keeping folks sleep-deprived has been a famous method to induce the feeling of helplessness in captured (imprisoned) folks.)

Li’s group involved tests using two chambered cages with a closed door between them.  They then placed mice in one chamber, where the floor provided them with shocks at random intervals over a few days.  (This randomness would mean the mice could not discern a pattern or learn behavior to avoid the shocks.)  When the door between the chambers was opened on day three, the mice escaped to the other chamber. (Some even waited by the door during the two day shock period, so they could immediately escape the shocks when the door was opened.)  But about 1/5 of the animals didn’t run to the other chamber.

This intrigued the researchers, so they attempted to discern what parts of the brain were activated by such behaviors.  They repeated the experiments using genetically modified mice who have  neurons that glowed green upon activation of their brain centers.  They found that mice that learned helplessness had more nodes of connection among the neurons of the medial prefrontal cortex.   As such, it could mean that there was increased and decreased activities in this brain region.

The researchers weren’t done.  They had to verify this hypothesis.  So, they boosted the neural activity of the prefrontal cortex in the resilient mice.  Who then became helpless.  The resiliency had been switched off.    (We already knew the right drug or therapy can overcome helplessness- we didn’t know we could cause it.)

The problem with employing these results for humans is that there are multiple regions in our brains that are associated with depression- the amygdala and hippocampus regions comes to mind.   So, that will complicate the translation of results to humans.

It is interesting, though, that Drs. Leah Sommerville (lead), Rebecca Jones, Erika Ruberry, Jonathan Dyke (all of Weill Medical School, Cornell) and Gary Glover (Stanford) just reported (Psychological Scienc) that teens exhibit more self-governance and inhibition with a greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex region of the brain.

So, maybe we can start helping folks deal with these issues more readily.

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