~5 video from Nature: Erasing Fear Memories
---
This made me really curious about what exactly fear is, so I spent a few minutes hoping around Wikipedia pages and here is a bit of what I gathered:
Fear is an emotional response to a perceived threat that commonly manifests itself through electrical resistance of the skin, heart rate, breathing, and muscle response. Fear is related to the specific behaviors of escape and avoidance, and is distinguished from anxiety which typically occurs without any external threat.
The amygdala is the key brain structure in the neurobiology of fear. Deactivating the amygdala can prevent the learning and expression of fear, but don't hurry to deactivate it because it could also lead to overreaction to all objects, hypersexuality, inability to recognize familiar objects, and a condition in which "inappropriate objects are placed in the mouth."
The fear response can be mitigated by consciously perceiving fearful stimuli.
Finally, here is a bit of neuro-parisitic awesomness: There is a parasite that inhabits a rat's amygdala, making it less fearful and sometimes even causing the rat to seek out the smell of cat urine thereby increasing the chance the rat will be eaten, giving the parasite a new, larger host for its offspring.
Wikipedia pages:
Fear
Fear conditioning
Amygdala
Extinction (operant conditioning)
---
A bit of wisdom from my friend Bob:
Risk awareness seems necessary, but we don't have to be afraid in order to calculate and avoid risks. I'm not saying fear is a bad thing. Fear is good. When we feel it, we need to pay attention to it. Better still is to know where it's coming from within us and whether it's due to some real risk or some old experience that's no longer helpful.
