The Neuroscience of Anxiety (The Social Brain Ep 32)

At first glance, it seems silly to fear things that haven’t happened or may never happen. What is the point of getting worked up over something you may have no control over? Odd as it seems, the truth is, most of us do this on a regular basis. It’s a normal process that occurs in the brain and one you are probably deeply familiar with: anxiety. In this episode, we’ll see that while not all anxiety is bad, it very often causes us to suffer
unnecessarily. We’ll see how this occurs in the brain and how we can take control of this response and live more peaceful lives.

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#anxiety #neuroscience #brain #anxietyrelief

Creative Commons / Attribution 3.0 Unported License (CC BY 3.0)

[georgelee]

Really brilliant episode, thank you so much!!

[glenndavies]

Thanks Guys. Another great podcast - rich with useful information

.

I have, however, a question regarding your comments on the role of the amygdala.


Andrew you state that the amygdala is “kind of more ‘neutral’ when it comes to like valence, whether it’s positive or negative.”



In this regard, can you shed light on the observation of Robert Sapolsky which seems to indicate that the amygdala activation is strongly correlated with negative valence.

Below is a verbatim transcript of his conversation with Andrew Huberman. This extract has been drawn directly from the Huberman Lab Podcast.


AH: “What really creates this thing we call valence, that an experience can be terrible, or feel awful, or it can feel wonderful, exhilarating, depending on this somewhat subjective feature we call valence. What do we know what valence is or where it resides?”



RS: “On a really mechanical level, the fear of a circumstance that is requiring that your heart races and you’re breathing as fast and you’re using your muscles and some such thing, you’re going to be having roughly the same brain activation profile, whether this is for something wonderful or something terrible, with the one exception being that if the amygdala is part of the activation, this is something that’s going to be counted as adverse, whether that’s the circumstance and adverse circumstance, recruiting the amygdala into it, and how much (strong) it is involved, biases towards interpreting it as even more awful. The amygdala in some ways is kind of the check point as to whether you’re talking about excitement or terror.”


I would love to hear your thoughts.