Scientists have discovered that life at an altitude has a significant impact on the brain, slows down the face recognition process and changes their emotional awareness. The researchers compared young people to live in the mountains, with people living at lower heights. The results showed that the residents of the mountain reacted longer to their facial expressions and brain activity at this time different from the activities of people living closer to the sea level. The work is published in the Journal of Neurology.

Earlier, it was known that life in mountainous areas was related to increased risk of depression and anxiety disorder. In the Central Highlands, like Tibet and Himalayas, depression is much higher than the low area. Moving to such places can lead to anxiety, depression and even suicide thoughts.

In the new experiment, scientists compared two groups of students: some living in Tibet at an altitude of 3658 meters, others in Beijing at a height of 52 meters above sea level. All participants conducted a test in which they show their faces with different emotional expressions – happiness, evil and neutral. Their mission is to determine the gender of a person in the picture as quickly as possible, while scientists have recorded brain activity by masculine electrical method.

The results show that students living at high altitudes have reacted longer to the image of those, even though they still retain the accuracy in the answer. Their brain activity when realizing other people with the activities of their colleagues in the plains: the initial signals related to the attention of the impaired person, and the dominant characteristics of almost all. The person disappears. In addition, among the students living in the mountains, the brain reacts weaker with a happy face, this can explain the increased risk of depression: If a person is aware of the positive emotions of the person. Other, this can form a more gloomy picture of the world.

Scientists believe that the lack of oxygen affects brain function, slows down and changes emotional treatment mechanisms. However, they emphasized that so far they cannot connect these changes to the development of depression, because the research has been conducted in just one temporary cut. In the future, they plan to observe people moving to mountainous areas to understand exactly their emotions change over time.