Confronting fears is a core component of cognitive behavioral therapies for anxiety disorders, but also a major hurdle for patients. A new study introduces a method for reducing defensive responses without consciously confronting the threatening cues, paving the way for fear-reducing therapies via unconscious processing.
amygdala and its role in fear and fearlessness. As with many advances in science, it appears the more we know about the amygdala, the less we actually understand how= it works.In the first study, scientists identified specific neurons linked to a certain type of fear memory held in your amygdala. A released study that examines how fear responses are learned, controlled, and memorized found that a specific class of neurons called SOM+ in a subdivision of the amygdala plays an active role in these processes.In another paper, a University of Iowa team showed that the amygdala is not the only gatekeeper of fear in the human mind other regions—such as the brainstem, diencephalon, or insular cortex—could sense the body’s most primal inner signals of danger when basic survival is threatened.