Breaking the wall of ruminative anxious thought

so my research interest is quite a straightforward one basically how does all human spontaneous thought happen it's not that easy to get handed on but this Virginia Woolf quote does it quite well and it's from to the lighthouse and her protagonist here is basically just disengaging from the immediate external world and then it's mentioning that things start cropping up in our minds are things like scenes names sayings memories and ideas we're all familiar with this feeling of having spontaneous thoughts that feel like they're coming from nowhere so as my research interest as a cognitive neuroscientist I'm interested in the network that represents these types of thought this is known as a default mode Network and it's this cluster of different brain regions and what's happening here is that they're actually acting is a scaffold for all these seemingly random thoughts that are being fed in from different brain regions and helping us provide some sort of clear narratives so an idea a creative piece of thought or a plan for the future now the default mode networks has to be very careful with this balance how it's talking to different brain regions because if this becomes wrong you get a faulty neural network and you have things such as anxiety disorders from a fourteen-year-old Network in this example when people have anxiety the default mode network is talking too much to brain region specialized the threat detection and that means that the spontaneous thought isn't doing all those positive things I mentioned a minute ago it's generally doing negative emotional rumination now what we want to do is effectively break the default mode network out of this wall that is created by just talking to this one network too much and we're going to force it to talk to other networks by making individuals do a cognitive task when they're feeling more negatively emotional so the way we do this is we have built something called experience something we just get individuals to sort of do some sort of task that distracts them for a while and every so often we have a sort probe we've got an example of sort of probes there and we just interrupt them and we ask them what they're thinking through a series of questions that aren't that transparent and what we found is we can actually track things like emotional thoughts throughout time so this is one of our individuals from one of our studies who actually had a higher amount of anxiety as you can see there the thoughts start off quite neutral for a while you know they're negative and then they've raised the positive again now what we want to do is we want to take this something and we want to put it into people's smartphones so instead of having it in a tub it's on a smartphone now and they're just doing everyday tasks and every source from the dot notification and they ask Lancer a simple set of about seven or eight different questions takes less than a minute in anxious individuals what we're going to do then is when they're negative emotional feelings are ramped up we're going to interrupt them and ask them is play an immersive cognitive game and this break the default mode Network out of that room ative thought and it makes it connects with other networks that are doing other things cognitively this has been used to treat post-traumatic stress recently so we know it works at disrupting emotional thought and so this is a really unique no one's tried it no one's tried to put it actually in people's phones and actually do information is treatment through that although recently other sort of psychiatrist and health professionals have seen that there is a application for this with smart phone technology as well as medication thank you great thank you can I just clarify so it's the interruption itself that breaks the cycle of the negative room but LeBron and any interruption would do again more the question in most respects the game so sorry I should say there's actually the benefits of this a two-fold so the questions are really useful because actually samples in real time the emotions so if you imagine being a practitioner if the patient agrees you can actually track how they've been doing before you see them so that's one benefit well the second part is swatting points for the rumination is happening so cycles as a negative thought happening very frequently in between thought probes at that point you hit them with the thing that is a game and it's something like Tetris works quite working it's really immersive studies have shown in the past that just three minutes is actually enough to sort of disrupt that emotional Network at the brain trauma talk to because you know texture has got nothing really directly to do with does network and can I just feel sorry I'm going to cheat a quick supplementary question group encountered one so you think it's hitting the same sort of mechanisms that the cognitive behavioral therapies in this area do it's related but it's not directly the same I wouldn't say it's exactly part of the same thing I know cognitive behavioral therapy sort of it's the onus is build on the patient to actually bring back those methods this sort of takes out of their hands and actually provides the disk rack distraction if you will so I'd say it's actually possibly a-level easier but it could actually be integrate with cognitive behavior theory just from the from the point of the thought probe of knowing when the rumination of something and talking about a CBT and the way your research can play into that it's interesting to me and imagine this would work very well on mild to moderate cases of anxiety but for more severe cases have you had any evidence of any results from that and would you say it's more of an extra step for the for those kind of cases rather than and a replacement of say things like CBT yeah that's a good question so we try actually currently set up a clinical link-up with some people at Suffolk who have clinically diagnosed anxious individuals to test this on we agree I agree with you that actually it deserves a mid level right now is where this would probably work the best but actually when you look at the health statistics at the Garcias there's a significant trend of those being the more prevalent cases so we actually think it might be a good interventionist point to come in up and potentially stop say rumination becoming a habit in these people you can disrupt at the right times but it's a good question we will try to expand into a clinical population oh yes Christian thank you that's a really interesting idea so if it works they should be treated as a sort of standard medical intervention that obviously I wonder if there's a social side I can imagine if I was a an employer and suddenly my employees were being requested to play Tetris on a regular basis I might start to get somewhat annoyed so I was wondering if you thought they were going to be complicated guy that's the way employees treat right now I think they'd be much happier that someone else is taking care of the problem and just that's an answer the phone but to be honest the frequency of the samples would be set to be slightly higher than this you know actually needed without being intrusive so they could effectively ignore them at the right times and plus when they're actually engaged in a task action individuals can be sort of ignoring those emotional feelings because you know they're busy so if they're busy it's kind of fine we're really trying to target those periods of free thought that usually use for useful constructive thought and stop them being dominated by the negative room and it's a sort Mille Adam thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: University of York

Views: 67,097

Keywords: University of York, York, UK, York uni, uniofyork, anxiety, mental health, mental illness, psychology, falling walls, Falling Walls Lab York, smart phones, anxiety disorder, research

Id: AD_Ay-mwLoc

Length: 6min 49sec (409 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 23 2017