What scares you the most?
Maybe it’s teetering precariously on the ledge of a skyscraper; perhaps it’s a giant, hairy tarantula crawling across your laptop keyboard. Maybe it’s giving a wedding toast and telling a joke that makes nobody laugh.
For a long time, the prevailing research assumed that the responses to these three scenarios occurred similarly within the brain.
“There’s this story that we’ve had in the literature that the brain regions that predict fear are things like the amygdala, or the orbital frontal cortex area, or the brainstem,” says Ajay Satpute, an associate professor of psychology at Northeastern University. “Those are thought to be part of a so-called ‘fear circuit’ that’s been a very dominant model in neuroscience for decades.”
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Photo by Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University
