Research Hit: Our “Fight or Flight Response” is Actually Very Refined

New brain scanning research shows that behavioural responses are situation dependent and much more nuanced than we may think

First published on my Substack: https://leadingbrainsreview.substack.com/

Wasn’t the fight or flight response always a massive simplification?

Yes, but it is overused in many contexts — we also know that it is at least four responses: fight, flight, freeze, or faint. But that is also a massive simplification.

How so, aren’t these basic behavioural models that have been with us for aeons?

Yes, this is the basic assumption: that we have a basic “approach” or “avoid” behavioural pattern. Approach the good stuff, and avoid the bad stuff and this fight or flight is the basic concept based on animal research. And hence in much literature this concept of fight or flight has taken a lot of space (more than it should do actually).

This is precisely what Samy Abdel-Ghaffar and colleagues of Trinity College Dublin the University of California Berkeley, and the University of Texas at Austin, wanted to explore in more detail and see what was happening in the brain.