You are walking through the forest and suddenly SEE a giant bear which freaks yo

Question

You are walking through the forest and suddenly SEE a giant bear which freaks you out making your heart pound and you run away... these responses are referred to as emotional expression.

Map the pathways in the nervous system that brings information about the bear into specific nuclei of the amygdala, the sequence of processing by specific amygdala nuclei, and the outputs from the specific amygdala nuclei to other brain regions that mediate specific components of emotional expression.

How would the brain respond differently if we heard the bear?

Explanation / Answer

Amygdala is the part of the brain which receives information for decoding emotions, in particular, stimuli that are threatening to the organism. Many sensory inputs are involved in relaying the information of potential dangers to amygdala either directly through the sensory thalamus or from sensory cortexes. Amygdala also receives inputs from hippocampus as this region is involved in storing explicit memories. Hence, the close association of hippocampus with amygdala responds to the traumatic event.

Amygdala also has connections with prefrontal cortex and this association triggers a conditioned fear which gradually loses its effect.

There are two pathways of fear 1) Short, fast but very imprecise and 2) Long, slow yet precise

The short route which more direct route which prepares the animal for the danger even before we know what exactly it is. The short route is via the sensory thalamus. The stimulus is received by the sensory thalamus and directly passed on to the amygdala which evoke a fear stimulus. This happens even before we actually know what the danger is.

The long and slow route involves the passage of information from sensory thalamus to sensory cortex and then to amygdala to evoke the response. This happens when we actually see the danger in front of us. This type of response is precise because our brain actually tells us precisely what to do.

When the bear sounds are heard the short, fast route is activated.

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