The term “doomscrolling” describes the act of endlessly scrolling through bad news on social media and reading every worrisome tidbit that pops up, a habit that unfortunately seems to have become common during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The biology of our brains may
play a role in that. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in
St. Louis have identified specific areas and cells in the brain that become
active when an individual is faced with the choice to learn or hide from
information about an unwanted aversive event the individual likely has no power
to prevent.
The findings, published June
11 in Neuron,
could shed light on the processes underlying psychiatric conditions such as
obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety — not to mention how all of us cope
with the deluge of information that is a feature of modern life.
“People’s brains aren’t well
equipped to deal with the information age,” said senior author Ilya Monosov,
PhD, an associate professor of neuroscience, of neurosurgery and of biomedical
engineering. “People are constantly checking, checking, checking for news, and
some of that checking is totally unhelpful. Our modern lifestyles could be
resculpting the circuits in our brain that have evolved over millions of years
to help us survive in an uncertain and ever-changing world.”
In 2019, studying monkeys,
Monosov laboratory members J. Kael White, PhD, then a graduate student, and
senior scientist Ethan S. Bromberg-Martin, PhD, identified two brain areas
involved in tracking uncertainty about positively anticipated events, such as
rewards. Activity in those areas drove the monkeys’ motivation to find
information about good things that may happen.
But it wasn’t clear whether
the same circuits were involved in seeking information about negatively
anticipated events, like punishments. After all, most people want to know
whether, for example, a bet on a horse race is likely to pay off big. Not so
for bad news.
“In the clinic, when you give
some patients the opportunity to get a genetic test to find out if they have,
for example, Huntington’s disease, some people will go ahead and get the test
as soon as they can, while other people will refuse to be tested until symptoms
occur,” Monosov said. “Clinicians see information-seeking behavior in some
people and dread behavior in others.”
To find the neural circuits
involved in deciding whether to seek information about unwelcome possibilities,
first author Ahmad Jezzini, PhD, and Monosov taught two monkeys to recognize
when something unpleasant might be headed their way. They trained the monkeys
to recognize symbols that indicated they might be about to get an irritating
puff of air to the face. For example, the monkeys first were shown one symbol
that told them a puff might be coming but with varying degrees of certainty. A
few seconds after the first symbol was shown, a second symbol was shown that
resolved the animals’ uncertainty. It told the monkeys that the puff was
definitely coming, or it wasn’t.
The researchers measured
whether the animals wanted to know what was going to happen by whether they
watched for the second signal or averted their eyes or, in separate
experiments, letting the monkeys choose among different symbols and their
outcomes.
Much like people, the two
monkeys had different attitudes toward bad news: One wanted to know; the other
preferred not to. The difference in their attitudes toward bad news was
striking because they were of like mind when it came to good news. When they
were given the option of finding out whether they were about to receive
something they liked — a drop of juice — they both consistently chose to find
out.
“We found that attitudes
toward seeking information about negative events can go both ways, even between
animals that have the same attitude about positive rewarding events,” said
Jezzini, who is an instructor in neuroscience. “To us, that was a sign that the
two attitudes may be guided by different neural processes.”
By precisely measuring neural
activity in the brain while the monkeys were faced with these choices, the
researchers identified one brain area, the anterior cingulate cortex, that
encodes information about attitudes toward good and bad possibilities separately.
They found a second brain area, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, that
contains individual cells whose activity reflects the monkeys’ overall
attitudes: yes for info on either good or bad possibilities vs. yes for intel
on good possibilities only.
Understanding the neural
circuits underlying uncertainty is a step toward better therapies for people
with conditions such as anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, which
involve an inability to tolerate uncertainty.
“We started this study
because we wanted to know how the brain encodes our desire to know what our
future has in store for us,” Monosov said. “We’re living in a world our brains
didn’t evolve for. The constant availability of information is a new challenge
for us to deal with. I think understanding the mechanisms of information
seeking is quite important for society and for mental health at a population
level.”
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