Sublime

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.

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

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

What makes us each have his or her own individual anxiety level?

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.

amygdala