Anxiety is a common experience and affects every person throughout their lifetime. Anxiety disorders such as GAD, OCD and social anxiety affect millions of people, including myself. I wanted to understand the science behind some of the common mental health issues that sufferers face as a result, hopefully having that research become a springboard for a creative interpretation. I'm interested in the biological behind-the-scenes of things I'm so familiar with and know many other people deal with (e.g. family members, my generation). Also, I find that understanding something really helps me feel calmer about it, so a project about this topic would be quite helpful, even therapeutic.
Key points: Generalised Anxiety
- "Anxiety is the result of constant chatter between a number of different brain regions - a fear network."
- "Neural pathways, comprised of neurons connected by dendrites, are created in the brain based on our habits and behaviors. The number of dendrites increases with the frequency a behavior is performed. I picture these neural pathways as deep grooves or roads in our brain."
- Chronic hypervigilant baseline psychophysiological arousal (e.g. higher heart rate) in absence of threat, greater reactivity to threat. AKA, Constantly on alert.
- "Active blunting of the emotional and autonomic response to improve overall functioning during social situations that provoke anxiety."
- Decreased connectivity between amygdala (responsible for emotional processing, specifically fear and fight-or-flight response) and prefrontal cortex (essential for decision-making, determining stimuli importance and emotional regulation, particularly controlling negative emotions). Increased connectivity to cortical executive-control network - leads to obsessive worry, GAD patients feel overwhelmed by emotion (believe feeling upset = coming undone), worrying becomes a distraction designed to avoid facing unpleasant feelings, works in the short term but becomes problematic over time.
- Hypersensitive amygdala initiates fast response to danger - communicates with hypothalamus, prompting quick release of hormones that raise heart rate and blood pressure, tense muscles. Overreaction, causing emergency stress response. "Over time, anxiety becomes attached to situations, thoughts, and memories unrelated to genuine sources of danger. In this sense, the brain may inadvertently create its own fears."
- Malfunctions of the sympathetic nervous system can keep the body in a state of stress (cortisol response), producing adrenaline more regularly than it is healthy to. Chain reaction of exaggeration.
Time for some idea development. One main thing I'd say I experience from social anxiety is a tendency to think in self-centred ways, because I can easily convince myself that everybody is watching and judging me. A visual representation of this would definitely be a house/hall of mirrors, found traditionally at funfairs and amusement parks. Also known as a mirror maze, this attraction has been used extensively in media, e.g. Stranger Things S3E7, Jordan Peele's 'Us', the Twilight Zone 'In Praise of Pip' and 'John Wick: Chapter 2'. Mirror mazes are designed specifically to play on and manipulate human perception, similar to mental afflictions. They remind me of changing rooms in popular high-street clothing retail stores, in which I never feel the least bit comfortable. Suddenly seeing so many angles of myself having been unaware of them my whole day, and realising it's unmediated reality, definitely provokes anxiety in myself and many other people in the same situation, especially under dreadful shop lighting. This worry shows in other ways, like checking my appearance in every reflective surfaces I pass (e.g. massive showroom windows on the way into town). I also spent my adolescence in a bedroom with a full wall-length mirror wardrobe, which I would stare into for completely unreasonable amounts of time, often breaking down and just watching it happen.
These obsessive, ritualistic and self-absorbed behaviours are habits with years of neural pathway conditioning behind them. Synaptic plasticity is what makes OCD-adjacent compulsions and habits so hard to break/"unlearn". There are just under 100 billion neurons in one human brain, connected in a vast network that essentially wires the mind as an "electrochemical machine". I've always been entranced by the shape and structure of nerve cells, these agents of habit. Particularly the forms of dendrites and axon terminals evoke such vivid imagery of tree roots/branches ("arborisation" literally meaning tree-like), electrical wires and alien organisms. When imaged together, they remind me of marble textures, lightning streaking across the sky, galactic fantasies of deep space and tirelessly crafted spider webs.
Set designer Es Devlin worked with Chanel in creating this scented, interactive mirror maze-like installation in an empty Peckham warehouse, where people could walk around and become part of the artwork. Including spiral stairs was refreshing, as it gave literal physical dimension to the experience, elavating the work's impact through structural variety. I feel there's a lot of potential for depth in this idea due to the irregular but intentional arrangement of different mirrors - diversity in shape and size may take away from the puzzling labyrinthe effect, but could be an interesting way to manipulate reflected light.
https://www.aislynndmerricksson.com/mirror-maze/ Here is a short, wonderful poem I came across that echoes many of the sentiments I've expressed in my reflection on the metaphorical, cerebral associations of mirrors.
Mirrors also represent a wider, more relatable human desire for self-awareness and outwards performance regulation. To borrow from Ken Wilder's concept of the four quadrants of consciousness, we train ourselves to believe that the mirror sees what others think about us and what we also think of ourselves. However, the mirror only reflects; it does not think, therefore it does not judge. With anxiety, one seeks out judgement and practices unhealthy thinking habits such as negative self-talk and attempts at mind-reading, creating a negative feedback loop that is quickly internalised and difficult to shake. Really, it's all this that is mirrored; anxiety puts itself forward as a stand-in for your own perception. Oftentimes when one looks in the mirror, one doesn't see themselves; one sees their insecurities. Perceived flaws and imperfections, which are treated as critical disasters under the influence of anxiety, shortcomings that strip one of their human worth. I read a comment on the YouTube upload of 'Ryan', an animated documentary I covered in a previous post, which somehow moved me.
Moving from the superficial to the personal level, hyper-analysing speech and overthinking social interaction can often lead one to space out in a conversation - sometimes, you try so hard to look like you're paying attention that you actually forget to pay attention, because it takes up so much mental energy. It sounds silly and it is silly, because preferably, you'd be able to trust your brain with competently processing verbal and sensory input, but out of nowhere you can simply start to shut down. I've described the cerebral noise before as TV static, because it's always there, straining and demanding, which manifests physically - through muscle tension, rhythmic fidgeting, trichotillomanic impulses, swaying as self-soothing, irritability and heightened sensitivity to sound/repetitive movement.
To begin synthesising these ideas, I created moodboards and some rudimentary photobashes and sketches of still image compositions.
'Modeling the brain as an electrochemical machine' (26/08/2016) In: Titan. At: https://titan.uio.no/naturvitenskap-teknologi-livsvitenskap-innovasjon-english/2016/modeling-brain-electrochemical-machine
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