How to Live Dangerously by Warwick Cairns

Author:Warwick Cairns
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312533892
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Let’s have a look at this in a little more detail.

There is an answer, you see, to the question of fear, and why it feels the way it does, and why we find ourselves torn, at moments of crisis, between conflicting urges. There’s an answer to why, even, it seems to make sense to talk of professors and dogs. This answer is to be found in the structure of your brain. In particular, it is to be found in a collection of “organs” and connections within it, all centered around a region called the amygdala, (four syllables, a-mig-da-la), and all of which, together, are known as the fear network. It’s a network that has, to simplify slightly, a part that thinks and a part that deals in emotions and the memory of past emotions.

First the “thinking” part of it. Your brain looks, from the outside, very much like a cauliflower. The thing that gives it this cauliflowerlike appearance is the rippled outer layer, which is called the cortex, a word that comes originally from Latin, where it means “bark.” It’s in this outer layer that most of our conscious thinking takes place; and, in your case, it’s what’s weighing up these words you’re reading right now.

Different areas of the cortex have different roles and functions, but the area that concerns us most right now, from the point of view of the fear network, is situated just forward from the crown of your head, and is known as the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is where your conscious thoughts and goals get translated into actions. It’s where what you think of as your personality gets translated into the way that you dress and speak and behave. It’s where you decide, and act, on what is and isn’t correct social behavior: it stops you scratching your backside in public, among other things. So think of it as the central headquarters of the conscious control of behavior.

Now for the “feeling” part of the fear network, the amygdala. The amygdala is a little almond-shaped organ—the name is Latin for “almond”—and it lives deep inside the core of your brain. It is much older in its evolutionary origin than the cortex and altogether different in function. Where the cortex deals in thoughts, the amygdala deals in emotions and the memory of emotions. Where the cortex deals in logic and deduction and right and wrong, the amygdala deals in the shifting currents of feeling. And in particular, the amygdala is right at the very center of almost all of the brain events associated with the feeling of fear.

It’s worth taking a brief detour here, on the subject of mice. Not just any common or garden mice, but special mice, mutant mice, mice genetically engineered in a laboratory by a real professor by the name of Vadim Y. Bolshakov. What Bolshakov did was to knock out a single gene from mouse embryos, which meant that the resulting mice were unable to produce a protein called stathmin. The function of stathmin, in the brain, is to help nerve cells make connections within the amygdala.

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