Do you know horror movies help identify how brain processes anxiety, fear?

New Delhi: As per a research, scientists have furnished a fact that watching horror movies can help in identifying how brain processes emotions like fear and anxiety.

People are motivated to remember fearful events, because this information is useful for daily survival.

Yet over-interpretation of fear may lead to anxiety and other mental disorders, researchers said.

Until now, the brain circuit underlying fear has only been mapped in rodents.

Now, researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in the US have recorded neuronal activity using electrodes inserted into the amygdala and hippocampus of nine people as they watched scenes from horror movies to stimulate the recognition of fear.

"Deep brain electrodes capture neurons firing millisecond by millisecond, revealing in real time how the brain attends to fearful stimuli," said Jie Zheng, a UCI graduate student.

Researchers demonstrated that these two regions, nestled deep in the centre of the brain and which play a key role in recognising emotional stimuli and encoding them in memories, are directly exchanging signals.

(With PTI inputs)