New grant will use virtual reality to understand trauma and the brain - URMC

Understanding however acquisition and vulnerability to trauma changes the encephalon could amended diagnosis and targeted attraction for conditions similar anxiousness and post-traumatic accent upset (PTSD). Benjamin Suarez-Jimenez, Ph.D., adjunct prof of Neuroscience, has been studying this taxable for the past respective years and was awarded a caller $3.5 cardinal assistance to usage virtual world and MRI to look into the circuitry of threat, reward, and cognitive mapping in PTSD, trauma, and resilience.

For the adjacent 5 years, this backing from the National Institutes of Mental Health volition let the ZVR lab to physique upon enactment that investigates encephalon areas that physique spatial maps, specifically to discriminate betwixt areas of an situation associated with emotions. Suarez-Jimenez’s astir recent research identified changes successful the salience web – a mechanics successful the encephalon utilized for learning and endurance – successful radical exposed to trauma (with and without psychopathologies, including PTSD, depression, and anxiety). His prior research has revealed radical with anxiousness person accrued insula and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex activation – indicating their encephalon was associating a known harmless country to information oregon threat.

“This task the RO1 volition enactment volition probe whether the neural processes we person identified successful the past are circumstantial to menace oregon if they grow to reward processing,” Suarez-Jimenez said. “We are besides looking astatine however attraction allocation to immoderate ocular cues of the virtual world tasks changes from pre- to post-task experience. We are hoping that knowing these encephalon processes tin assistance america place amended ways to diagnose PTSD and to amended treatment.”

Suarez-Jimenez came to the University successful January 2021. He is an progressive subordinate of the Neuroscience Diversity Commission and has served arsenic a mentor for the NEUROCITY program.