With a flip of a switch, researchers can make a mouse can shed its anxious, shy demeanor. The scientists can dial mouse anxiety up or down by lighting up a very specific connection between two parts of the brain.
The results, reported online March 9 in Nature, “gets us that much closer to understanding how the [anxiety] system works or how it doesn’t work in clinical cases,” says neuroscientist and psychiatrist Kerry Ressler, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Emory University in Atlanta who was not involved in the study. The results, he says, will help researchers gain a deeper understanding of circuits in the human brain important for psychiatric disorders.