What is Fear? 

Fear involves sympathetic arousal, eyelid retraction, and distress. Read this account to put yourself in the mood.

Fear is often defined as an emotional response to a real or immediate threat (and anxiety is what we call the response to an imaginary or remote threat)? Why does fear appear in newborns as the outcome of loud noises and falling? (How often are infants hurt by loud noises or falling?) It’s associated with the startle reflex and the Moro reflex, respectively. Later it becomes a response to pain, abandonment, and, to some extent, novelty. For example, the stimulus chosen to evoke fear in Little Albert was a loud gong.

Children and adults pick up fear responses by observing. A parent who is upset by a bee in the house may communicate a fear of bees (apiphobia) to a child. To study fear in the lab, psychologists focus on fear conditioning, in which a sensory stimulus like a tone (or a gong) is paired with electric shock. This pairing will make a rat freeze and defecate when it hears the tone after just one or two trials of training. Yet with all the evidence of learned fear, a question remains about its prenatal or even genetic origins. Do we have a built-in tendency to fear snakes and spiders more than guns and tasers, which are much more dangerous? 

What is the Function of Fear? 

Fear is a special type of learning and memory. It can be learned in a single conditioning trial and retained for a lifetime. Since it is a common element of stress, it is important to understand its management. It is obviously not all-or-none; it varies in strength. Some people engage in fear for recreation, in skydiving or mountain climbing or other extreme sports (click on Real Player or Windows Media). For some people, fear is immobilizing and overpowering. 

Unpleasant emotions like fear and dread seem to be generated by activity in the amygdala. It has been known for many years that surgical removal of the amygdala tames wild monkeys. The so-called Klüver-Bucy syndrome has been identified in humans as well. It’s worth noting that it involves more than just tameness. A failure to appreciate this led to atrocious psychosurgery on prisoners involving Drs. Mark, Ervin, and Sweet 40 years ago.)

The amygdala lies near the frontal end of the temporal lobes, just where pencils stuck into an eye and ear on the same side of the head would meet. Recent research has shown that it is amazingly well connected with other parts of the brain. 

A threat will affect the brain in two ways. An immediate response follows alerting of the lateral region of the amygdala. This first reaction is not a logical response, as the amygdala is not wired that way. The other, slower response that considers logic comes from the prefrontal cortex, which can inhibit the behavior that the amygdala triggers. So we will start to back away from a snake when the amygdala is alerted, then relax and continue on our way when the cortex recognizes the snake as a stick. In The Emotional Brain, Ledoux labeled these two routes the low road and the high road.

Questions

What are the components (biological, cognitive, behavioral) of a specific emotion like love or fear?

What are the advantages of an emotion like love or fear? Cockroaches may lack emotions yet they manage to reproduce and escape threats pretty well.

 

 

Two Kinds of Amnesia

The basic distinction is between retrograde and anterograde amnesia. A person who has lost the ability to recall events preceding a trauma has retrograde amnesia. Someone who cannot form new permanent memories has anterograde amnesia. It is not uncommon for someone to have both kinds at once.

Retrograde amnesia can occur after a concussion, electric shock, hypothermia, hypoxia, some drugs, an epileptic seizure, or brain damage—almost anything that interrupts the normal operation of the brain for a few moments. Since short-term (or working) memory (STM) has not been consolidated in long-term memory (LTM), disturbing its pattern of activity makes the memory forever irretrievable. Therefore the memory of the trauma itself—the car wreck, the near-drowning—is lost forever. In addition to this storage impairment, retrograde amnesia commonly involves some disturbance in recalling already-consolidated memories, too. This is a retrieval impairment, which—unlike the storage failure—often recovers; the earliest memories are recovered first. 

Anterograde amnesia typically occurs with disease or surgery such as Korsakoff's syndrome, temporal-lobe resection, or Alzheimer's disease. The patient is left with working memory and, often, an intact LTM, but no way to convert short-term memories to long-term memories—no way to consolidate memories. Such people can hold events in short-term memory for a couple of minutes, if they're not distracted; they can recall old memories from before the surgery or onset of disease. However, they can't recall anything recent. They read old magazines anew each day and must be introduced to people each time they meet them. As the book points out, however, they may have lost declarative memories but not implicit memories. They can't remember your name from yesterday but they may be able to learn a new motor task like mirror writing.

The surgical removal of temporal-lobe tissue caused the most famous case of anterograde amnesia decades ago in H.M., who died in 2008.  A disease of thyroid insufficiency sometimes seen in alcoholics, Korsakoff's syndrome, involves anterograde amnesia. Alcoholics often subsist on poor diets--foods like sugar doughnuts made from refined flour that lacks thiamine. Unfortunately, ethyl alcohol (grain alcohol) blocks the uptake of whatever thiamine (vitamin B₁) is left. As a result, alcoholics suffer major thiamine deficiencies. World War II demonstrated that thiamine deficiencies destroy parts of memory. British prisoners of war held by the Japanese were fed polished rice and little else. The rice was not fortified with vitamins. Almost all of the husk, or bran, had been polished off, and that bran was where the rice's thiamine was concentrated. As a result, the POWs developed beri-beri from thiamine deficiency. They developed heart trouble and memory deficits.  

Anatomically, Korsakoff’s syndrome is associated with shrinkage of the hippocampus and with degeneration in several output targets of the hippocampus, such as the mammillary bodies.

Questions (please answer one)

1. At what level(s) of the nervous system are memories formed—molecular, cellular (neuronal), brain systems? Describe what happens to form memories or abolish them.

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