That’s the takeaway of a brain imaging study led by CU Boulder and Icahn School of Medicine researchers, suggesting that imagination can be a powerful tool in helping people with fear and anxiety-related disorders overcome them.
“This research confirms that imagination is a neurological reality that can impact our brains and bodies in ways that matter for our wellbeing,” said Tor Wager, director of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at CU Boulder and co-senior author of the paper, published in the journal Neuron.
Being afraid of the unknown is not a new concept. From birth to death we’ve been trained to fear everything for a very long time. The dangers of modern life have a stranglehold on people’s imaginations. Sociologists call the phenomenon a risk society, describing cultures increasingly preoccupied with threats to safety, both real and perceived, but most definitely imagined.
Our ability to judge risk is sophisticated, and instinctual decisions often serve us well. But when something doesn’t quite seem to sync up, gut to head, then it’s time to pause and at least question what’s causing the discrepancy.
Neurolinguistic programming, emulating psychosis, television, advertising, the illusion of terrorism and several other remarkable concepts affect every facet of our lives and our world at the expense of our health, safety and security.
About one in three people in the United States have anxiety disorders, including phobias, and 8 percent have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Since the 1950s, clinicians have used “exposure therapy” as a first-line treatment, asking patients to face their fears–real or imagined–in a safe, controlled setting. Anecdotally, results have been positive.
But until now, very little has been known about how such methods impact the brain or how imagination neurologically compares to real-life exposure.
“These novel findings bridge a long-standing gap between clinical practice and cognitive neuroscience,” said lead author Marianne Cumella Reddan, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at CU Boulder. “This is the first neuroscience study to show that imagining a threat can actually alter the way it is represented in the brain.”...<<<Read More>>>...
