She relaxed in the recliner, her eyes closed, her hands resting lightly in her lap. The psychiatrist’s assistant made small talk while pushing the woman’s hair this way and that, dabbing her head with spots of paste before attaching the 19 electrodes to her scalp.

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As the test started, her anxiety ticked up. And that’s when it began: the sensation of being locked in a vise. First, she couldn’t move. Then she was shrinking, collapsing in on herself like some human black hole.

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It was a classic panic attack — captured in vivid color on the computer screen that psychiatrist Hasan Asif was watching.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said, his voice quiet and soothing. “Just stay with it.”

The images playing out in front of him were entirely unexpected; this clearly wasn’t a resting state for his patient. With each surge of anxiety, a splotch of red bloomed on the computer screen. Excessive activity of high-energy brain waves near the top of her head indicated hyper-arousal and stress. Decreased activity in the front of her brain, where emotions are managed, showed she couldn’t summon the resources to keep calm.

“This was your brain as you were sitting there trying to relax,” Asif explained afterward, rerunning the sequence for the woman, who for many of her 37 years had struggled against crushing waves of dread. “Look at what just happened. This was the area of your brain that started firing. . . . It’s right there on the screen.” To read more from Amy Ellis Nutt.