I think there are two types of fear mostly, the innate survival animalistic fear and the self-perpetuating fear caused due to misunderstanding. The animalistic fear is present in all and it's not possible to get rid of. When you see a snake or a tiger in front of you, that fear is natural. The response is to jump or run and is so spontaneous, you can't really control it. It's necessary for survival. But I think we are interested in the other fear, the one that is bound to attachment. You see a tiger, you panic, turns out to be a cat, you laugh it off, go away, that fear is not an issue. But if you go about your day thinking, what if that was a tiger? What if I get jumped by tiger this time? Then, you are creating the fear. The fear has no basis, except for it was implanted to you awhile ago. And now you are attaching yourself to it. You are extending it which is the actual problem. Most of us have fears that go back to childhood. If you think back far enough(like the tiger example), question yourself why you are afraid, you know the answers.<p>One more example, I used to be afraid of getting heart-attacks in the past. Even gas passing would make me panic. Have I ever had a heart-attack before? No. How am I so damn sure that I have a heart-attack if I don't even know what it's supposed to feel like? Heart-attack is a bad thing and it shouldn't be happening to me. How is every acid reflux a heart-attack to me now. I have created my own bubble of fear. When though? I sure as hell didn't know what heartattack is when I was born. So it happened when I was able to comprehend what a heart-attack is right? For me, it's due to people around me passing, it's due to reading on Internet about young celebrities dying to strokes, watching movies, etc. It got implanted in me. I don't know a heartattack I just have an idea of it which is not the same thing. Not even remotely related.<p>Fear arises due to misunderstanding. If you trace it far back enough, fear was implanted mostly in the childhood.
Dreams and fear have an odd and slightly unintuitive relationship. When we are anxious and awake the amygdala is active and norepinephrine (the “fight or flight” neurotransmitter) is high.<p>During REM sleep, surprisingly the amygdala is inactive and norepinephrine is 85% lower than base waking levels (not high anxious levels). So the brain is in a super relaxed state!<p>I wrote a paper on the implications for dream content and interpretation (I’m a psychotherapist in training).<p>If you’re interested you can find the paper here:<p><a href="https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz" rel="nofollow">https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz</a><p>And it was discussed on HN here:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590</a>
I think I got help from studding the experience of the 'anatomy of fear' in 'The Emperor Jones', a 1920 play by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill. It helped me understand how irrational fear would gradually get into me. I was stranded in desert area known for hyenas. Walking with a heavy backpack for 7 hours in complete darkness to reach the camp, I started 'seeing' things in the dark. I started singing first, then praying, couldn't find stones to throw at dark spot I though were water ponds formed during the heavy rain, I had a break down. Then I saw the lights of the camp that showed me how I deviated from the path to it by a far margin. But something pleasant happened afterwards, I felt I conquered fear and my tolerance for unpleasant things got a big boost.
<a href="https://gwern.net/backstop#hui-nengs-flag" rel="nofollow">https://gwern.net/backstop#hui-nengs-flag</a> -- Evolution as Backstop for Reinforcement Learning -- Hui Neng’s Flag -- the mathematics of positive and negative reinforcement<p><a href="https://gwern.net/fiction/batman" rel="nofollow">https://gwern.net/fiction/batman</a> -- The Gift of the Amygdali -- Sci-Fi, anxiety, pain
To me very illustrative are the scans here - looks like Honnold's visual cortex (lighted up path at/from the back of the head) doesn't have [that good] connection to amygdala and thus no fear response:<p><a href="https://nautil.us/the-strange-brain-of-the-worlds-greatest-solo-climber-236051/" rel="nofollow">https://nautil.us/the-strange-brain-of-the-worlds-greatest-s...</a>
During burn out, I had utterly debilitating and constant anxiety. My brain was just a dial-tone and I could barely move or think.<p>Absolutely useless adaptation/response. Just made things worse.<p>An SNRI completely suppressed it.
The single most impactful book on my mental health was Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence. The Amygdala chapters were truly life altering for me in helping me overcome a lot of childhood trauma. You learn how that little bit works, and how to reprogram it, and it's incredibly powerful. Not easy, but very powerful.
> The researchers took samples from brains of humans and rhesus macaque monkeys, separated individual cells and sequenced their RNA. This shows which genes are active (being expressed) in a particular cell and allows researchers to sort them into groups based on gene expression.<p>How do you extract RNA from monkeys without activating the RNA that expresses fear?
Anxiety is treated effectively and usually permanently by Schema Therapy [1] in a few months. Who would choose lifetime payments for pills?<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_therapy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_therapy</a>
Every time the amygdalae come up, I always point out it affects almost all tings human: <a href="https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/13/1/43/4596542" rel="nofollow">https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/13/1/43/4596542</a>
> The researchers took samples from brains of humans and rhesus macaque monkeys, separated individual cells and sequenced their RNA. This shows which genes are active (being expressed) in a particular cell and allows researchers to sort them into groups based on gene expression.<p>Thats (potentially) a lot of neurons to sift through isn't it? I wonder what their process was, or how many neurons they can sift through. Too bad the paywall (yay for greedy journal institutions profiting off the labor of scientists)
tl:dr - brains are weird man<p>There's a tremendous episode of Radiolab called Fault Line that talks about the effect of a total resection of the Amygdala. It worked out very poorly. I heard it weeks before I was scheduled for a right temporal lobe resection, including Amygdala and it scared the bejeesus out of me. A quick call to my neurosurgeon's coordinator assuaged my fears.<p>The bilateral resection caused Kluver-Busey syndrome in the patient that Fault Line discusses.