Electrical stimulation to a specific region of the brain can block the return of fear responses, study finds

An experimental study on university students explored whether electrical stimulation to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex region of the brain can prevent a person’s fear response to cues associated with unpleasant stimuli from returning after the person has learned to not react with fear to those stimuli.

Results showed that the electrical stimulation of this brain region prevented the participants from being startled upon seeing the experimental cues and it also abolished the involuntary components of the fear response. The study was published in Translational Psychiatry.

In order to survive, living beings need to be able to recognize things that they should fear and those they should not. They need to be able to react defensively in the face of cues that have been previously associated with a threat, before the threat itself has appeared. This process of learning which cues are associated with a threat and which are not is scientifically called “the fear memory recall.”

As conditions change, organisms need also to be able to learn to not react defensively or to tune down their defensive reactions when cues are no longer associated with a threat. This is referred to as fear extinction.

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