Sublime

When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.

The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls the pathway to the amygdala “the low road,” which is extremely fast, and that to the frontal cortex the “high road,” which takes several milliseconds longer in the midst of an overwhelmingly threatening experience.

It constantly scans our environment for cues: Should I be careful here? Is this a dangerous situation? Is this person a friend or foe? Am I properly hydrated and fed to deal with any threats? The autonomic system uses something called neuroception – a ‘sixth sense’ that operates outside our conscious awareness – to assess our environment and put pe

David Barlow. He was (and still is) one of the premiere anxiety researchers on the planet.

These findings undermine the idea that the amygdala contains the circuit for fear. They point instead to the idea that the brain must have multiple ways of creating fear, and therefore the emotion category “Fear” cannot be necessarily localized to a specific region. Scientists have studied other emotion categories in lesion patients besides fear, a

The emotional brain’s cellular organization and biochemistry are simpler than those of the neocortex, our rational brain, and it assesses incoming information in a more global way. As a result, it jumps to conclusions based on rough similarities, in contrast with the rational brain, which is organized to sort through a complex set of options.

The automatic reactions that control our emotions come from neural associations within our memory networks that are independent of our higher reasoning power.

A different level of brain activity is involved for each response: the mammalian fight-or-flight system, which is protective and keeps us from shutting down, and the reptilian brain, which produces the collapse response.