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Fear is an important human emotion and essential to survival so not to be underestimated.
It allows us to avoid life-threatening situations and avoid them again in the future — so fundamentally a good thing. However, we also know that fear can be debilitating, cause inaction, anxiety, and be involved in multiple psychiatric disorders such as PTSD.
We know that fear and threat is primarily, initially at least, processed in a part of the brain called the amygdala. This also controls attention (and also other emotions). This then connects to the frontal regions of the brain. These frontal regions are involved in attention, but also cognition and what we can consider higher, or executive, functions, such as decision making and also controlling our impulses.
This has been known for a long time, but this does not help us understand the precise mechanisms of fear and how in some people it becomes entrenched and leads to severe anxiety disorders.
A group of researchers around Barchiesi of the Linköping University in Sweden have now given us a deeper insight into this and how this happens in a paper just published.
This is where it gets technical — as if the above wasn’t. But let me guide you through this.
