CYBCYL Chapter 5 – Looking Into Anxiety and Fear: The Basal Ganglia

This chapter delves into the role of the basal ganglia in our daily lives. They are a set of large structures toward the center of the brain that surround the basal ganglia system. The basal ganglia are mainly associated with integrating feeling, thoughts, and movement and helping to shift and smooth motor behavior. People with basal ganglia problems are prone to anxiety attacks and very low motivation. As for the functions of the basal ganglia, there are many more, including:

• Integrating feeling and movement
• Shifting and smoothing fine motor behavior
• Suppressing unwanted motor behaviors
• Setting the body’s idle speed or anxiety level
• Enhancing motivation
• Mediating pleasure/ecstasy

The basal ganglia is responsible for the decision/initiation to move. Often when a situation is too shocking to witness, an individual may literally be unable to move (frozen in space). Additionally, the basal ganglia are involved in suppressing unwanted motor activity. When people have abnormalities in this area, they are often prone to voice or vocal tics. The basal ganglia are also involved in anxiety signaling, which is one of the main things that Amen stresses in this chapter. Overactive basal ganglionic activity can be indicative of over-anxiety, as a certain patient case describes. It may be responsible for Tourette’s syndrome as well. Heightened basal ganglia activity may even lead to excessive motivational behavior (“workaholics”). Often these people work intense hours during the week and are very uncomfortable with the unstructured and restless period over the weekend.

The basal ganglia are very interesting to study. I did not know that they are what enables you to “choose”, per se, what action to conduct (when there are many actions in your mind). I am very interested to read Amen’s prescrtiptions for the problems with this system. It is also very curious to see that some of the problems with the basal ganglia resemble drug addictions under a brain scan. For instance, intense romantic love resembles a cocaine-like effect on the brain, and much dopamine is released in the basal ganglia.

This descriptive chapter is meant to introduce the reader to this part of the system, tell what it is responsible for, and list the problems associated with that part. Again, since this is such an interesting part of the brain, I look forward to reading about how to fix the problems associated with it. I recommend other readers to follow the helpful checklist that Amen provides in this chapter to find out if you have certain problems in the basal ganglia of your brain.