Summary Of Searching The Brain For The Roots Of Fear By Joseph Ledoux

Seen in the eyes of many as a joke or more than often confused with fear due to it’s many similar characteristics. In his article called, “ Searching the Brain for the Roots of Fear”, published in January 2012 on The New York Times, Joseph LeDoux, gives his opinion about anxiety to those who don’t know anything about it. He proves that anxiety occurs when we over anticipate things, causing fear within ourselves. Throughout his article he provides multiple scenarios and situations showing his audience how anxiety works, and how it differentiates from fear. Fear is a feeling we all have felt at one moment in our lives. LeDoux, gives us a thorough and simple example of how fear plays a huge role in anxiety. For example, we are walking one day and all of a sudden a snake appears right next to us. Instantly us humans are wired to be startled and scared. Now next week if we walk in the same environment, we still have the thought of the snake even though it isn’t there. He is trying to tell us that we overthink the situation

The human brain is made of thousands of things we have no clue about, but when it comes to anxiety, he explains that the amygdala in our brain causes most of the problems. He tells us that the amygdala, “connects the two events, forming an unconscious memory of the association.” This is the reason why we recall a moment of fear and feel it again in a similar situation. To give us a better picture of what he is trying to tell us, LeDoux illustrates for us an example that doesn’t contain fear to show us how our mind can connect things together. He summarizes Pavlov’s famous experiment and tell us that, “When the bell rang the dog salivated because the bell had previously been rung as the dog was being fed. ” The bell creates a sort of “neutral stimulus”, which activates the amygdala creating the same feeling we had at the