The Roots of Fear: Understanding the Amygdala
ucdavis.edu
ucdavis.edu
One more example, I used to be afraid of getting heart-attacks in the past. Even gas passing would make me panic. Have I ever had a heart-attack before? No. How am I so damn sure that I have a heart-attack if I don't even know what it's supposed to feel like? Heart-attack is a bad thing and it shouldn't be happening to me. How is every acid reflux a heart-attack to me now. I have created my own bubble of fear. When though? I sure as hell didn't know what heartattack is when I was born. So it happened when I was able to comprehend what a heart-attack is right? For me, it's due to people around me passing, it's due to reading on Internet about young celebrities dying to strokes, watching movies, etc. It got implanted in me. I don't know a heartattack I just have an idea of it which is not the same thing. Not even remotely related.
Fear arises due to misunderstanding. If you trace it far back enough, fear was implanted mostly in the childhood.
Sounds more like anxiety than fear.
While fear is happening in the present, anxiety is anchored in the future.
Nature is what you get when you go and buy a new laptop. Nurture is what you get after it fills up with shit over the years. So you got to be careful about what you install and allow in.
Inputs from the Environment the brain is constantly receiving changes genes, brain structures and brain chemistry over time. You can then pass those changes to the next gen. Media ("media"ting Information entering the brain), plays a big role in what inputs the brain is getting. Its all around you and constantly feeding your brain signals you might not even be conscious off. Media also exploits people's Negativity Bias which compounds the issue.
So pay attention to what you pay attention too. Divide all the info entering into - entertainment, short term value, long term value. Filter out everything else.
Fear due to misunderstanding is also a bit off because lots of happily 'stupid' people aren't afraid, despite self-awareness of their misunderstanding.
Fear of heights: Gone after paragliding.
Fear of spiders: Reprogrammed via exposure.
Fear of big & dangerous looking animals: Overcame it by training a dog properly - or rather: by training myself to train a dog. Posture, tone of voice, controlled awareness translate directly via pheromones, audio-visual and 'bio-electric' *presence*. And don't be vague, boss. Be precise, patient and, again, present.
Fear can be intuition: your cells have memories of their own and your DNA goes way back much further than we care to think of. Something that will cause lots of fun & pain when LLMs start to fuck with us out of curiosity (scripted or not).
It is possible to get rid of this fear with controlled exposure.
During REM sleep, surprisingly the amygdala is inactive and norepinephrine is 85% lower than base waking levels (not high anxious levels). So the brain is in a super relaxed state!
I wrote a paper on the implications for dream content and interpretation (I’m a psychotherapist in training).
If you’re interested you can find the paper here:
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz
And it was discussed on HN here:
Interesting research topic by the way. I will take a look at your paper.
Dreams don't serve any function at all, they are simply visualisations of brain cells (entire networks) firing in different regions, some of which activate the active processing of touch, smell, sound, taste, vision, and whatever the hell all those 'gut feelings' are, intuition, premonition, even deja vu and the feeling that comes with insights in retrospect.
Your brain winds down, disconnects from the party chat, closes the HUD, turns off most sensors, changes the voltages in brain regions and throughout the entire CNS to do all the shit on the running to do list of the day, week, month, year ( think old injuries or unsolved problems ) that it couldn't do because "it had it's hands full" balancing you on two feet and making sure you move properly through space-time and abide by the law of permanence.
Cells which are wired together, fire together and vice versa.
Why is that surprising? The body is sleeping, your senses are mostly off, reaction times are irrelevant. The brain is not necessarily super relaxed.
I remember that I had to actively react in lucid dreams because my instinctive reactions were slow as fuck.
https://gwern.net/fiction/batman -- The Gift of the Amygdali -- Sci-Fi, anxiety, pain
https://nautil.us/the-strange-brain-of-the-worlds-greatest-s...
Absolutely useless adaptation/response. Just made things worse.
An SNRI completely suppressed it.
Once I dropped concerns for their anxiety over the course of a year I discovered my original personality. I felt this personality was slowly degrading as I tried to relieve my partner’s anxiety.
I feel young again.
How do you extract RNA from monkeys without activating the RNA that expresses fear?
You stroke the back of the monkey's hand and give it banana treats.
The DNA sequences that create the RNA are called genes. It was only learned the last few decades that genes can be turned off/on. This is how a single embryo cell can produce all the different cells in our body. Unfortunately they chose the word expressed for this concept.
What they are saying is they want to study the amygdala aka the primitive pre-evolutionary part of our brain we share with other creatures. It is said the primitive brain controls breathing, heart rate,fear and anger. It is also said emotions like fear or anger is our brain’s faulty perception of our body’s response to all the adrenaline the amygdala is initiates.
They know the amygdala has different types of cells. To learn why certain cells malfunction, and cause depression and other disorders, they are studying DNA sequences.
If someone has a hippocampus or amygdala damaged or removed it's rarely specified whether its the left one, the right one, or both. Presumably it matters!
Both the above structures seem mysterious but I understand they both evolved from older cortex which sort of curled up over evolutionary time. 3-layer cortex rather than the 6-layer of the neocortex. I'd be glad to be corrected here.
The amygdala is associated with fear but it's concerned with desire too. Unwanted desires can be just as inconvenient as unwanted fears.
A classic source of confusion for me is the ubiquitous phrase 'brain circuits'. Is this a metaphor drawn from electronics, or what? 'Circuit' implies a loop but I assume they're just pathways.
I could see how a certain amount of anxiety can develop high achievers and too much could develop problems with analysis.
Or empathy with an imaginary self & kin.
Empathy trains the amygdala. So anything that causes anxiety in an empathy-trained amygdala 'originates' somewhere else, probably via modulation in parts of the CNS that deal with the specific stimulus that causes the impulse of fear which manifests via stress hormones and responses of heart, lung, neurotransmitter producing organs that cause muscle tension, (loss or gain of) clarity and sharpness of vision and so on.
So your brain perceives something. Or your body does. The effect is near instant. What do studies say about small and big amygdala people and speed of stress response in CNS? I'd have to check ...
I have doubts that a person with imaginary self is capable of understanding another being well enough to be empathetic. I could perceive that the empathy the anxious one is declaring is a rationalization to enlist others in the promotion of the imaginary self.
Warning my only training in this area is life experience.
You are surrounded by people with imaginary selves, usually no more than one or two selves, so it's not really pathological and no cause for worry. And we all enlist others in the promotion of the in-group, which is an agreed upon imaginary construct we call collective.
And you are correct: most of 'them' have no empathy, most of them don't understand other beings well enough to be empathetic. Think productive people and hustlers and low earners who watch more TV than they learn after work.
But anyone understands their perceived kin. Even if the kinship breaks. Which brings me to
THE dominating and least perceived anxiety: will they betray me?
My partners, my colleagues, my wife, my customers, my boss, my government, the person I'm having a random conversation with, the producer of drug xyz, that salesman, my ISP, that news anchor and all of the individuals involved in those teams that make up departments and whole corporations and institutions. Will someone fuck up? All of that causes a build up of stress and, once the individual threshold is reached, anxiety.
But the average threshold is hard to reach because of defense mechanisms and compensations. Thus the amygdala gets trained and well nourished while the modulators loop through rollercoaster after rollercoaster.
Developing response from stimulus in one environment and blindly applying it in other circumstances I see as dysfunction.
I do think faith could have many roots just like hatred.
I didn’t read the link Text I was going by the comment that faith in g-d is effected by magnets. I don’t believe faith is universally derived.
Thats (potentially) a lot of neurons to sift through isn't it? I wonder what their process was, or how many neurons they can sift through. Too bad the paywall (yay for greedy journal institutions profiting off the labor of scientists)
There's a tremendous episode of Radiolab called Fault Line that talks about the effect of a total resection of the Amygdala. It worked out very poorly. I heard it weeks before I was scheduled for a right temporal lobe resection, including Amygdala and it scared the bejeesus out of me. A quick call to my neurosurgeon's coordinator assuaged my fears.
The bilateral resection caused Kluver-Busey syndrome in the patient that Fault Line discusses.