Learn to self-regulate your emotions by controlling the areas of your brain in which they occur

Callista Womick
2 min readDec 14, 2020

This video is based on research conducted by a team of scientists at PLA Strategy Support Force Information Engineering University on whether it is possible for individuals to learn to directly control activation of the hippocampus and thereby control their emotions.

The hippocampus is a seahorse-shaped structure in the central, lower part of the brain. It is involved in spatial navigation, social cognition (how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations), emotion processing, and turning short-term memories into long-term memories.

The amygdala, a pair of almond-shaped structures near the center of the brain, is involved in decision-making and the experience of intense emotions, whether negative or positive.

Emotional control is key to mental health and the focus of many forms of psychiatric therapy.

This research showed greater activation of the hippocampus and greater amygdala-hippocampus connectivity after four 38-minute neurofeedback training sessions, meaning that individuals did in fact learn to control these specific areas of their brains and increased their ability to self-regulate emotions.

This video is a practice session to familiarize individuals with what to expect during a full training session.

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Read the research article here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31379539/

“Emotion Regulation of Hippocampus Using Real-Time fMRI Neurofeedback in Healthy Human” by Yashuo Zhu, Hui Gao, Li Tong, ZhongLin Li, Linyuan Wang, Chi Zhang, Qiang Yang, and Bin Yan

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Keywords: autobiographical memories; emotion; hippocampus; amygdala; real-time fMRI neurofeedback; regulation; anxiety; depression; addiction; self help; psychology; therapy; healing; meditation; mental health; borderline personality disorder; sociopath; medicine; neuroscience; biohacking; frontier psychiatry

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