Sublime

His doctor explains that one part of Alex’s brain is underactive compared to those of most people, a tiny structure called the amygdala. The amygdala is the ‘threat detector’, responsible for generating emotions that help us survive – emotions like fear. People who have a defect in their amygdala don’t feel any fear at all, not with public

its Freudian themes in High Anxiety (1977).

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

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

The challenge to modern man is to reconcile the antithetical aspects in his personality. On the body level he is an animal, on the ego level a would-be god. The fate of the animal is death, which the ego in its godlike aspirations is trying to avoid. But in trying to avoid this fate man creates an even worse one, namely, to live in fear of life.

If the interpretation of threat by the amygdala is too intense, and/or the filtering system from the higher areas of the brain are too weak, as often happens in PTSD, people lose control over automatic emergency responses, like prolonged startle or aggressive outbursts.

Memory reconsolidation is a change to the Adaptive Child directly (subcortical, implicit emotional knowing) rather than a change to the Wise Adult (prefrontal cortex connected and responsive to the subcortical).

So if we feel stressed or in danger, our minds dig up memories of when we felt threatened in the past, and then create scenarios of what might happen in the future if we cannot explain what is going on now. The result is that the brain’s