You CAN overcome fear by finding your 'happy place', say scientists

October 10, 2008

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1074771/You-CAN-overcome-fear-finding-happy-place-say-scientists.html

By Daily Mail ReporterLast updated at 9:10 AM on 09th October 2008

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The brain can produce its own antidepressants with the right signal, report scientists, who say the finding suggests that meditating, or going to your 'happy place', truly works.

Mice forced to swim endlessly until they surrendered and just floated, waiting to drown, were conditioned to regain their will to live when a tone they associated with safety was played.

The experiment suggests that there are good ways to teach people this skill, and points to new routes for developing better antidepressants, said lead researcher Dr Eric Kandel of Columbia University.

Happy place: With the right training, your brain can produce its own antidepressants, scientists claim

'The happy place works. This is like going to the country,' Kandel said.

Writing in the journal Neuron, Kandel's team said they used classical conditioning to train mice.

They had already conditioned some mice to fear a neutral tone by playing the sound when they shocked the animals' paws. After a while, the tone itself created fear.

'It scares the hell out of the animal,' Kandel said.

Then they decided to reverse the study, and played the tone when they were not shocking the mice.

'It learned that the only time it was really safe is when the tone comes on,' Kandel said.

To make a mouse depressed, they used a method favored by drug companies called learned helplessness.

'You put an animal into a pool of water and it can't get out. It gives up and it stops swimming and it just floats,' Kandel said.

'When you give the animal an antidepressant, it starts swimming again. When we played the tone, it started to swim again just as it did with the antidepressant.'

New pathways

Further experiments showed the tone and an antidepressant drug, when used together, had an even larger effect, he said.

When they looked at the brains of their mice, they saw using the conditioned 'safety' tone activated a different molecular pathway than the drugs did.

It affected the brain chemical dopamine, while antidepressants work on another brain chemical called serotonin. Both are message-carrying molecules called neurotransmitters.

The conditioning also affected a compound called brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF - which helps nourish brain cells and encourages them to grow.

The learned safety did not affect levels of serotonin, which are important in the control of mood.

Mice conditioned by the 'safety' tone also had more new brain cells in a part of the brain involved in learning and depression.

Kandel noted that antidepressant drugs appear to work, in part, by encouraging the growth of new brain cells - as does psychotherapy.

'Learning involves alterations in the brain,' Kandel said.

'Psychotherapy is only a form of learning.'

This highlights how effective psychotherapy, meditation and other stress-reduction tools may be, and it could help in the design of new drugs, Kandel said.

'This opens up new pathways that may be profitable,' he said.