Anxiety Series - Neuropsychology and Attention
Attention is a hugely important aspect, and very impressive aspect, of our brains function. Attention can be thought of best, not in the focusing on some particular things, but in the removal of all unimportant sensory input. When you are talking to someone, your attention will be focused on the sound of their words, their body movements and their eyes (their eyes tell you what they are paying attention to). However, you are not paying attention to the sounds of others talking, cars passing by, birds singing, the ceiling above you, the floor beneath your feet, the feeling of your clothes on your skin and so on. All of these are being deliberately ignored by your brain, so you can focus on what is deemed important.
A baby cannot do this. The world is an incredible place for a child with constant sensory input and no idea what to focus on. They learn what should be focused on by tracking their parents’ eyes – what they look at is important, what they ignore is not (the implications of this are large and will be explored in a future post). Also, a child learns that the things that are predictably the same, every day, can be ignored. The sky, the floor beneath our feet, the feeling of clothes on our skin etc, can all be ignored. Neurologically, we can see this as a child’s brain undergoes a large change during its growth, when it loses, or prunes away, a large number of neural connections it had made previously.
Now imagine a child raised in an abusive household, where the abusive behaviour from a parent is never related to a certain behaviour from the child. The brain will be desperately trying to make a link between the abuse and what preceded it. In this way, the child won’t be able to prune a load of neural connections, as it may be trying to link many of them with the abuse, in order to know how to avoid it in the future. In this way, this child will hold onto giving attention to a vast amount of sensory input, most people do not. Or, imagine a child who went through a traumatic event, losing their parents in a large earthquake. This child may always have the ground beneath their feet within their attention and, any perceived sudden movements may trigger that trauma response via the neural connection that was formed in their childhood.
Anxiety, then, can be seen as the brain on edge, hypervigilant, taking in too much sensory input and not being able to focus on one particular thing, creating a feeling of being overwhelmed. Or, when this happens in certain situations, anxiety can also be the anticipation of feeling in such a way in an upcoming situation. For example, if in large groups someone experiences this overwhelming amount of sensory input, the anticipation of an event with a large group, could cause the same anxiety. This is difficult enough in the moment, but regular anxiety also accumulates over the years. Resulting in exhaustion, sleep deprivation, isolation, depression and diagnosable diseases.
Most neuropsychologist agree that, once a neural connection has been set (after the pruning stage on childhood) it cannot be disconnected. This means, the traumatic event, events, or way your brain has learnt to deal with difficult childhood situations, cannot be unlearnt, neurologically. However, this connection can be drowned out by other, more positive and practical connections. Think about the example of stepping out into the road we used in the first part of this series. The next time you cross the road, you will be very wary, the previous neural connection is dominant. But, after many successful attempts of crossing the road, you become slightly less wary every time. That memory may still come up when you come to cross a road, but it brings a milder emotional reaction and it is put into context.
The stronger the neural connection – the more impactful the traumatic event or the longer it occurred for – the longer it will take to put that connection into context with more positive connections in adulthood. It will, most likely, never completely go away, but it can be made much easier. See my final post of this series on exposure therapy for more information.
In the next post, we will look at anxiety as a construct, how this may be an unhelpful label and how it can be seen differently.