Word: amygdala
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...example, sees a long, curved shape in the grass out of the corner of his eye. He leaps out of the way before he realizes it is only a stick that looks like a snake. Then he calms down; his cortex gets the message a few milliseconds after his amygdala and "regulates" its primitive response...
Emotional life grows out of an area of the brain called the limbic system, specifically the amygdala, whence come delight and disgust and fear and anger. Millions of years ago, the neocortex was added on, enabling humans to plan, learn and remember. Lust grows from the limbic system; love, from the neocortex. Animals like reptiles that have no neocortex cannot experience anything like maternal love; this is why baby snakes have to hide to avoid being eaten by their parents. Humans, with their capacity for love, will protect their offspring, allowing the brains of the young time to develop...
Memories of concrete facts and events, which can in principle be retrieved on demand, are coordinated through the hippocampus, a crescent-shaped collection of neurons deep in the core of the brain. Other sorts of memory are handled by other areas. The amygdala, for example, an almond-size knot of nerve cells located close to the brain stem, specializes in memories of fear; the basal ganglia, clumps of gray matter within both cerebral hemispheres, handle habits and physical skills; the cerebellum, at the base of the brain, governs conditioned learning (as when Pavlov's dogs salivated at the ringing...
...when the news arrived. Posttraumatic stress disorder, which affects Vietnam vets like Bill Noonan, is another good example. While the intellectual memory of emotions is routed through the hippocampus, a different, gut-level sort of memory can be involuntarily revived with terrible clarity by abnormal activity in the amygdala. "It's been an eye opener to me that individuals we study who were traumatized 25 years ago still show abnormal brain function," says Dennis Charney, head of psychiatry at the VA hospital in West Haven, Connecticut. "Severe stress can change the way your brain functions biologically...
...rationally, even though his intelligence was not affected by his tumor. The part of the brain destroyed by invading tissue was in a region of the prefrontal cortex (see diagram) essential to decision making. But what Elliot lost, psychological testing revealed, was the ability to experience emotion. While the amygdala does process fear, his doctors argue from the example of Elliot and the other patients that other parts of the brain are also critical to regulating emotion...