What does the brain do when we get excited?
Neuropsychology tries to study the relationship between brain and behaviour. Every behaviour has it's origin in the brain as does excitement. Let's look at some definitions of excitement. The APA dictionary for Psychology defines Excitement as an emotional state marked by enthusiasm, eagerness, or anticipation, and general arousal. Vocabulary.com defines excitement as the state of emotionally aroused or worked up.
So we can all agree that, excitement, is a state of mind with certain marked characteristics. Things get more interesting when we look at the physiological and neurological characteristics of excitement. Physiologically speaking, fear and excitement are indistinguishable at times. This means to say we cannot look at a person's biofeedback exclusively and say if the person is anxious or excited. For example, some physiological markers of excitement are fast heart beat, tense muscles, pupil dilation,etc. which are virtually the same for feeling highly anxious and fearful.
Our brain also shows interesting activity at this point of time. When we get excited there are certain areas of the brain that show higher activation than most other parts. Namely there are five parts of the brain that show high electrical activity when we are excited. They are namely: (1) Pre-Central Gyri, (2) Post-Central Gyri, (3) Precuneus, (4) Inferior Frontal Gyrus, (5) Middle Frontal Gyrus. An EEG-study done on excitement elicited due to 'Drops' in music showed that regions (1), (2) and (3) showed higher activation before the drop came in the track being played and regions (4) and (5) showed higher activation after the drop. Therefore, it can inferred that excitement has some kind of pre-post element attached to it (Turrell, Halpern & Javadi, 2019).
What I mean to say by that is excitement is condition dependent response. There is some event with regards to which we get excited. The above mentioned study suggests that brain has specific regions which show activation before the activity happens and an activation after the event has happened. Furthermore, this is an EEG study. This means that only the pyramidal neurons are being considered for investigation upon excitement. (Pyramidal neurons are the neurons that are present in the outer-most layer of the brain i.e., the cerebral cortex.)
There could be other areas of the brain that maybe deeply embedded in the brain which are involved in our feeling of excitement. Part of the reason that our heart races when we are excited is because our glands release a good cocktail of hormones into our blood stream. Adrenaline is the most important constituent of these chemicals. Adrenaline, also known as epinephrine is released into our bloodstream which soon finds its way to the heart. That's kind of a sweet sentiment if you think about it*. Once it reaches the heart, the heart starts pumping blood faster. By the time 'epinep**' makes it way around the body, our body gets in to a mode of action.
In this state, we either confront the problem or we run like hell. Either ways release of adrenaline leads to a tremendous amount of energy expenditure (increasing the blood glucose levels). This signal for release of adrenaline from atop the kidney, adrenal glands and some neurons as well is sent out by a very specific, deep-rooted region of the brain. The adreno-pituitary-adrenal cortex releases the adrenaline on the mark of the hypothalamus. It is known as the HPA axis, a mechanism through which this physiological response is produced.
In the end, we all have experienced excitement and anxiety, and there may be subjective differences between them. However, like most things in life, and this is more of a philosophical stand, we have a choice over to do something and to not do something. Now, the power of this choice might be limited but, no matter how small, there is always a choice. We can choose to think of this physiological and neurological response produced by the brain as something dreaded, something to be fearful of or something to get excited by.
Keep Thinking,
Anand
*- Sweet because, epinephrine is like a message written in chemicals that finds its way to the heart.
**- not to confused with EpiNep, an injectable form of epinephrine
Reference:
The EEG Paper: Turrell, A., Halpern, A. R., & Javadi, A. H. (2019). When tension is exciting: an EEG exploration of excitement in music. BioRxiv, 637983.<https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=When+tension+is+exciting%3A+an+EEG+exploration+of+excitement+in+music&btnG=#d=gs_cit&u=%2Fscholar%3Fq%3Dinfo%3AR6uiZYK3Zj4J%3Ascholar.google.com%2F%26output%3Dcite%26scirp%3D0%26hl%3Den>
The Definition: https://dictionary.apa.org/excitement