Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The amygdala, especially the basolateral nuclei, are involved in mediating the effects of emotional arousal on the strength of the memory for the event, as shown by many laboratories including that of James McGaugh. These laboratories have trained animals on a variety of learning tasks and found that drugs injected into the amygdala after ...
Research has also revealed that lesions of the amygdala in both humans and animals produces a calming effect on aggressive behavior. [3] Based on these findings, amygdalotomy was developed as a neurosurgical procedure to ameliorate aggression by reducing arousal levels in the amygdala. [3] [11] The location of the amygdala in the human brain
Besides memory, the amygdala also seems to be an important brain region involved in attentional and emotional processes. First, to define attention in cognitive terms, attention is the ability to focus on some stimuli while ignoring others. Thus, the amygdala seems to be an important structure in this ability.
The basolateral amygdala also receives dense neuromodulatory inputs from ventral tegmental area (VTA), [2] [3] locus coeruleus (LC), [4] and basal forebrain, [5] whose integrity are important for associative learning. The information is then processed by the basolateral complex and is sent as output to the central nucleus of the amygdala. This ...
McGaugh and colleagues posit that although electrical and pharmaceutical stimulation directly to the amygdala can enhance or decrease memory, the amygdala is not the main site for any long-term memory storage. Rather, the amygdala acts as a modulator for storage processes occurring in other areas of the brain.
The extended amygdala is a macrostructure in the brain that is involved in reward cognition and defined by connectivity and neurochemical staining. [1] [2] It includes the central medial amygdala, sublenticular substantia innominata, and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. [1] The boundaries are indistinct in Nissl stained sections. [2]
PTSD can affect several parts of the brain such as the amygdala, hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex. The amygdala controls our memory and emotional processing; the hippocampus helps with organizing, storing and memory forming. Hippocampus is the most sensitive area to stress. [59]
The enhancing effects of emotional arousal on later memory recall tend to be maintained among older adults and the amygdala shows relatively less decline than many other brain regions. [75] However, older adults also show somewhat of a shift towards favoring positive over negative information in memory, leading to a positivity effect.