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A surprising feature of how the brain stores memories could help explain why harmless situations can sometimes quickly feel threatening, a hallmark of anxiety and trauma disorders.

Scientists have long believed that fear helps the brain draw a clearer line between danger and safety. The new study by researchers at the Douglas Research Center at McGill University and the University of Toronto Scarborough, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggests the opposite.

In preclinical experiments, mice learned to associate one environment with danger and another with safety. Rather than becoming more distinct, the brain maps for the two environments began to overlap.

"Our findings suggest fear may blur the boundary between danger and safety rather than sharpen it," said senior author Mark Brandon, associate professor in McGill's Department of Psychiatry and researcher at the Douglas. "This could reshape how scientists think about anxiety and PTSD."

Researchers built an augmented reality arena that allowed them to "teleport" mice between an environment associated with danger and one with safety, using changes in sights and sounds. Miniature microscopes recorded the activity of hundreds of hippocampal neurons in real time.

"That gave us something conventional fear conditioning experiments cannot easily provide: a moment-by-moment view of the brain switching between competing maps of dangerous and safe memories," said Robert Rozeske, assistant professor in the University of Toronto's Department of Psychology and lead author on the publication.

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