12-14-2019, 07:42 AM
(12-13-2019, 09:42 AM)Shannon Wrote: Understanding fear as I do now has taken me a long, long time to accomplish, and I allow the evidence to guide me. I am open to all evidence that is provable, and so your reference to the study in rats makes an intriguing point. My argument is not to prove you wrong, but to get you to prove yourself right. If you can do that, or come close enough to warrant further investigation, I am open to that. And I believe that you have done that here. Thank you for providing me with more options to consider in this endeavor. It has become extremely difficult to find new options to move the FRM forward recently.
In recent years there were several interesting studies that poked at the decreased fear response mechanisms when psilocybin was involved.
Here is the abstract of one such study (Kraehenmann et al., 2016):
Quote:Stimulation of serotonergic neurotransmission by psilocybin has been shown to shift emotional biases away from negative towards positive stimuli. We have recently shown that reduced amygdala activity during threat processing might underlie psilocybin's effect on emotional processing. However, it is still not known whether psilocybin modulates bottom-up or top-down connectivity within the visual-limbic-prefrontal network underlying threat processing. We therefore analyzed our previous fMRI data using dynamic causal modeling and used Bayesian model selection to infer how psilocybin modulated effective connectivity within the visual–limbic–prefrontal network during threat processing. First, both placebo and psilocybin data were best explained by a model in which threat affect modulated bidirectional connections between the primary visual cortex, amygdala, and lateral prefrontal cortex. Second, psilocybin decreased the threat-induced modulation of top-down connectivity from the amygdala to primary visual cortex, speaking to a neural mechanism that might underlie putative shifts towards positive affect states after psilocybin administration. These findings may have important implications for the treatment of mood and anxiety disorders.
Maybe this or similar studies can provide you with some new inputs to develop FRM further.
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