Introduction – Injuries causes’ pain and these are part of any war or any traumatic events can scorch themselves into human memories. There are recent research displayed clued to how brain appears to form all those memories. The cell that feels so is astrocytes but earlier they thought these cells as those who provided food and comfort. But now they turned with different function and helps in learning from tough times.
One beneficial point obtained from fear and pain is to anticipate and avoid triggers in future. But when an event is truly terrible such memories act as a source of post-traumatic stress-disorder or PTSD. Such conditions are experienced because of terrible events like terrorist attack, kidnapping or battlefield etc. People with such problem may feel flashbacks during traumatic events which they can replay again and again, or they may become anxious even when there is no danger.
Experiment – Lead researcher figured out where fear crosses line from learning trauma. There is difficulty in studying PSTD on people as different people have different experience. So, they worked on rats and to sharpen their memory they used short series of foot shock didn’t injured them. Researchers even researched on them responding to be very painful and scary.
Researchers described researchers are not fool when it comes to fear and first week was painful but remained jumpy after second milder shock. They didn’t want to make rats miserable rather want to know what going on their brains and focused on the hippocampus, an area of the brain important for learning and memory.
Result – A chemical important in inflammation was been oozed out after their first painful experience, the rat’s hippocampus released a chemical called interleukin 1 beta that responds to stress or injury. The percentage was 90 percentile from astrocytes and was a fact of shock. Earlier researchers’ anticipation over the cells was to just provide food to neurons and other non-nerve cells in the brain act as mere support cells.
These cells are stars to the nervous system that conduct electric signals. Astrocytes are very important cell and through an experiment that is treating animals’ brains with drug designed to turn signal in their brains. This time rats showed calm behavior and with this they learned rats fear. They went for further research to be displayed.
Conclusion – Few things were recognition by other researchers that this may differ in humans as still there are no PSTD in humans. And this research the confusion and false anticipation had been cleared but still research has to be continued on the human point of view.
