[FRIAM] Eternal questions

[Roger Critchlow]

https://www.quantamagazine.org/mental-phenomena-dont-map-into-the-brain-as-expected-20210824/

A quanta article titled The Brain Doesn’t Think the Way You Think It Does

Joseph LeDoux
> <https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/joseph-e-ledoux.html> is a
> neuroscientist at NYU known for his pioneering work on the amygdala, which
> is often referred to as the fear center of the brain. But that framing, he
> says, is very wrong — and very harmful. “I kept being introduced over the
> years as someone who discovered how feelings of fear come out of the
> amygdala,” he said. “But I would always kind of flinch when I would be
> introduced this way. Finally, I had enough.”



> LeDoux has spent the past decade emphasizing that the amygdala isn’t
> involved in generating fear at all. Fear, he points out, is a cognitive
> interpretation of a situation, a subjective experience tied up in memory
> and other processes. The psychological phenomena that some people
> experience as fear may be experienced as something very different by
> others. Research shows that the feeling of fear arises in the prefrontal
> cortex and related brain areas.



> The amygdala, on the other hand, is involved with processing and
> responding to threats — an ancient, subconscious behavioral and
> physiological mechanism. “The evidence shows that it’s not always fear that
> causes the behavior,” LeDoux said.



> Calling the amygdala the fear center might seem innocuous, he continued,
> but “then the amygdala inherits all the semantic baggage of fear.” That
> mistake can distort attempts to develop medications, including those aiming
> to reduce anxiety. When potential treatments are tested in animals under
> stress, if the animals behave less timidly or show less physiological
> arousal, it’s usually interpreted as a reduction in anxiety or fear levels.
> But a medication can change someone’s behavioral or physiological responses
> — those outputs of the amygdala — without curing feelings of anxiety,
> LeDoux said.

“The whole field is suffering because of this confusion,” he said.



> Similar problems occur in other areas, he added, such as studies of
> perception, where the physical processing of the sensory stimulus and the
> conscious experience of it are often bundled together. In both cases,
> LeDoux believes “these need to be pulled apart.”


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