Word: amygdala
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...What areas of the brain are you looking at for more insight about how consumers think? I find it incredibly sad, but let me explain my whole theory of the amygdala. The amygdala is the part of the brain partly responsible for fear. During the recession fear is really growing to immensely higher levels. Advertising in the United States will start to push the fear button. Amygdala activation will grow more in the future, and we will see more and more brands which appeal to the fear factor. They say, "Use my product...
...mental condition that is caused only by genes. (Rett syndrome is one example.) Rather, if you take something like generalized anxiety disorder (300.02), there may be a variety of causes that set it off: genes that cause excessive activity in the fear-producing part of the brain called the amygdala, a stressful job that stimulates that activity, engaging in dumb behavior like having an affair that exacerbates your anxiety, then randomly getting into an anxiety-heightening situation like a car accident. The DSM has to try to account for all of that complexity - causes, effects, unintended consequences - and still...
...time, and the PET scan showed that it was screaming loudly. Appetite and hunger are processed in a lot of regions - most notably the orbital frontal cortex, which is linked to self-control; the striatum, which is linked to motivation; the hippocampus, which is linked to memory; and the amygdala, which is linked to powerful emotions. In Wang's subjects, all these regions were ringing the dinner bell...
...areas of the brain those hormones affect most, owing to the fact that he used a long-running PET scan rather than a shorter session with a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI), which is how such studies are usually conducted. This afforded him a good look at the amygdala, the deepest and most primitive of the brain structures involved. When the amygdala acts up, it's exceedingly hard to bring it to heel, as anyone suffering from anxiety conditions like phobias or obsessive-compulsive disorder could attest. That the men in Wang's study had some success disciplining their amygdalas...
...takes a lot of inhibition to control the amygdala," says Wang...