Increasing activity in a deep region of the brain could boost the immune system’s response to vaccines — and people could be trained to do it themselves using brain scans and the power of positive thinking, according to a new study Published on Monday in Naturopathy. The findings may help explain the so-called placebo effect.
The researchers trained 34 participants using a technique called neurofeedback. Just as someone can be trained to lower their heart rate by watching a heart monitor in real time, people can learn to activate certain parts of their brain while lying in a brain scanner. “We open a kind of window into unconscious neural activity,” says study co-lead author and Yale University neuroscientist Nitzan Lubyanickar.
Participants were encouraged to try different mental strategies such as thinking about a positive memory or focusing on their body. And through real-time feedback, they learned to activate reward pathways in two deep brain structures, called the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and the nucleus accumbens.
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Two other groups of participants were trained to activate different brain areas or received no training. After this all the participants were vaccinated against Hepatitis B. Researchers measured their immune system’s response to the shot by checking levels of hepatitis B antibodies in their blood two and four weeks later.
People who had higher levels of activity in the VTA had higher levels of antibodies in their blood. This suggests that the body developed a stronger immune response when the VTA’s reward pathways were activated. “This study is one of the first to show that activity in a specific human brain region can be related to downstream antibody responses,” says Isaac Chiu, an immunologist at Harvard University who was not involved in the research.
That said, there was no significant difference in antibody levels between the group that received neurofeedback training focused on reward areas of the brain and the groups that did not. This may be because the nucleus accumbens, another reward region that some participants learned to enhance, did not have the same connection to the immune response, skewing the results.
Participants who focused on positive expectations during the brain scanner were more able to increase activity in the VTA, while focusing more on happiness or joy did not have the same effect.
The results may indicate a possible association with the placebo effect, a phenomenon whereby a sham intervention shows positive results in people who expect the treatment to benefit them.
“There must be some kind of biological mechanism that states that when we expect something positive to happen, something actually changes in our body,” says Lubienniker. And while this study didn’t explicitly test the placebo effect, it does suggest that our brains are linked to our immune system.
“This result showed the power of positivity. They used very modern and extensive methods, but the result is very simple,” says Kyungdeok Kim of Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the study but co-authored an article about the results.
Researchers are still working to understand how the connection between the brain’s reward system and the immune system works. Are brain signals transmitted to immune cells in the rest of the body via nerves, chiwanders, or some other mechanism?
Tamar Koren, a neuroimmunologist at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center and co-lead author of the study, speculates that it’s possible the connection has deeper evolutionary origins. Reward cues probably evolved to encourage us to seek food and mate – both of which can expose us to dangerous pathogens. It makes sense that, when we experience a feeling of reward, “we will also boost our immune response to something that is potentially harmful to us,” she says.
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