Word: amygdala
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...known to be involved in making associations and forming connections with people or things. (By comparison, over 50% of last year 's Super Bowl ads activated these regions.) The majority of this year 's commercials, on the other hand, predominantly activated anxiety regions of the brain, centered around the amygdala, the hub of our fear and emotional responses. "To me, that means these ads are going to be unsuccessful," says Freedman. "This group of ads as a whole had a violence associated with them that didn 't connect with people as being humorous or harmless. Something about them made people...
...anxiety regions to the reward areas, as people weigh and balance what they are seeing and how they are interpret what they see. "Typically what you see is different parts of the brain activated at the same time," he says. "The big surprise this year was just seeing the amygdala activated alone in so many...
...physical trauma. But in a series of experiments performed at New York University a few years ago, scientists went looking for racism. When they showed subjects pictures of unfamiliar white and black faces and scanned their brains with functional MRI machines, they could see heightened activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain that corresponds with emotional arousal. Moreover, the brain activity matched up with psychological tests designed to measure unconscious racism. "This technology is probably not ready for prime time yet," says University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Martha Farah, but she can foresee a day when police academies...
Second, even as it's kick-starting the body, the amygdala sends out a crackle of signals to the rest of the brain. Some of them put the senses on high alert, ready to deal with a threat. But these signals also tell the neurons that any memories recorded in the next few minutes need to be especially robust. One piece of evidence for this scenario: Lawrence Cahill, a colleague of McGaugh's at Irvine, showed subjects emotionally arousing film clips, simultaneously gauging the activity of their amygdalae using positron-emission tomography (PET) scans. Three weeks later, he gave...
Imaging studies also make clear that it isn't just dangers or tragic events that cement memory formation. Positive emotions, which are also mediated through the amygdala, have the same effect. Again, that's a perfectly reasonable evolutionary development. If eating or having sex makes you happy, you'll remember that and do it again, keeping yourself healthy and passing on your genes as well...