I think there are two types of fear mostly, the innate survival animalistic fear and the self-perpetuating fear caused due to misunderstanding. The animalistic fear is present in all and it's not possible to get rid of. When you see a snake or a tiger in front of you, that fear is natural. The response is to jump or run and is so spontaneous, you can't really control it. It's necessary for survival. But I think we are interested in the other fear, the one that is bound to attachment. You see a tiger, you panic, turns out to be a cat, you laugh it off, go away, that fear is not an issue. But if you go about your day thinking, what if that was a tiger? What if I get jumped by tiger this time? Then, you are creating the fear. The fear has no basis, except for it was implanted to you awhile ago. And now you are attaching yourself to it. You are extending it which is the actual problem. Most of us have fears that go back to childhood. If you think back far enough(like the tiger example), question yourself why you are afraid, you know the answers.

One more example, I used to be afraid of getting heart-attacks in the past. Even gas passing would make me panic. Have I ever had a heart-attack before? No. How am I so damn sure that I have a heart-attack if I don't even know what it's supposed to feel like? Heart-attack is a bad thing and it shouldn't be happening to me. How is every acid reflux a heart-attack to me now. I have created my own bubble of fear. When though? I sure as hell didn't know what heartattack is when I was born. So it happened when I was able to comprehend what a heart-attack is right? For me, it's due to people around me passing, it's due to reading on Internet about young celebrities dying to strokes, watching movies, etc. It got implanted in me. I don't know a heartattack I just have an idea of it which is not the same thing. Not even remotely related.

Fear arises due to misunderstanding. If you trace it far back enough, fear was implanted mostly in the childhood.

You can unlearn animalistic fears. And animals, insects (& some people to whom it applies) will respond accordingly.

Fear due to misunderstanding is also a bit off because lots of happily 'stupid' people aren't afraid, despite self-awareness of their misunderstanding.

Fear of heights: Gone after paragliding.

Fear of spiders: Reprogrammed via exposure.

Fear of big & dangerous looking animals: Overcame it by training a dog properly - or rather: by training myself to train a dog. Posture, tone of voice, controlled awareness translate directly via pheromones, audio-visual and 'bio-electric' *presence*. And don't be vague, boss. Be precise, patient and, again, present.

Fear can be intuition: your cells have memories of their own and your DNA goes way back much further than we care to think of. Something that will cause lots of fun & pain when LLMs start to fuck with us out of curiosity (scripted or not).

> What if [...]?

Sounds more like anxiety than fear.

While fear is happening in the present, anxiety is anchored in the future.

Anxiety is near future and usually has a specific set of possible causes. Dread is more of a far-future, diffuse flavor.

Its both nature/genes and nurture/environment.

Nature is what you get when you go and buy a new laptop. Nurture is what you get after it fills up with shit over the years. So you got to be careful about what you install and allow in.

Inputs from the Environment the brain is constantly receiving changes genes, brain structures and brain chemistry over time. You can then pass those changes to the next gen. Media ("media"ting Information entering the brain), plays a big role in what inputs the brain is getting. Its all around you and constantly feeding your brain signals you might not even be conscious off. Media also exploits people's Negativity Bias which compounds the issue.

So pay attention to what you pay attention too. Divide all the info entering into - entertainment, short term value, long term value. Filter out everything else.

> The animalistic fear is present in all and it's not possible to get rid of

It is possible to get rid of this fear with controlled exposure.

You paint the "what if?" fear as if it's completely useless, but I think it's important to consider these things and there's a reason we consider the alternatives. I don't think that's something we should try to get rid of

One is a feeling the other is an emotion. It still amazes me why, as a society, we keep treating them as the same.

Mostly because it's a multi-dimensional spectrum and because exceptions extend the rule and society deals with most exceptions via some form of adjustment 'therapy' and that requires a framework that the bulk of the people learns to be convincing enough so that the exposure effect supports/complements the (re-)adjustment.

Dreams and fear have an odd and slightly unintuitive relationship. When we are anxious and awake the amygdala is active and norepinephrine (the “fight or flight” neurotransmitter) is high.

During REM sleep, surprisingly the amygdala is inactive and norepinephrine is 85% lower than base waking levels (not high anxious levels). So the brain is in a super relaxed state!

I wrote a paper on the implications for dream content and interpretation (I’m a psychotherapist in training).

If you’re interested you can find the paper here:

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz

And it was discussed on HN here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590

> surprisingly the amygdala is inactive and norepinephrine is 85% lower than base waking levels

Why is that surprising? The body is sleeping, your senses are mostly off, reaction times are irrelevant. The brain is not necessarily super relaxed.

I remember that I had to actively react in lucid dreams because my instinctive reactions were slow as fuck.

I remember something similar being mentioned in a podcast by Huberman, that dreams serve to get used to stuff that we fear, in a nutshell. Maybe not directly stuff that we fear, but maybe stuff that makes us uncomfortable? Dreams are a way to teach us stuff that seem essential to us but we found them uncomfortable to face.

Interesting research topic by the way. I will take a look at your paper.

Doesn't apply to all the crazy shit some people dream of, as well as sex dreams or simple recollections of events or when the brain dreams in code or practices language skills or works on the integrity of your novels characters and the situations they get in.

Dreams don't serve any function at all, they are simply visualisations of brain cells (entire networks) firing in different regions, some of which activate the active processing of touch, smell, sound, taste, vision, and whatever the hell all those 'gut feelings' are, intuition, premonition, even deja vu and the feeling that comes with insights in retrospect.

Your brain winds down, disconnects from the party chat, closes the HUD, turns off most sensors, changes the voltages in brain regions and throughout the entire CNS to do all the shit on the running to do list of the day, week, month, year ( think old injuries or unsolved problems ) that it couldn't do because "it had it's hands full" balancing you on two feet and making sure you move properly through space-time and abide by the law of permanence.

Cells which are wired together, fire together and vice versa.

Like an endogenous version of Ketamine + Exposure Therapy for PTSD

I think I got help from studding the experience of the 'anatomy of fear' in 'The Emperor Jones', a 1920 play by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill. It helped me understand how irrational fear would gradually get into me. I was stranded in desert area known for hyenas. Walking with a heavy backpack for 7 hours in complete darkness to reach the camp, I started 'seeing' things in the dark. I started singing first, then praying, couldn't find stones to throw at dark spot I though were water ponds formed during the heavy rain, I had a break down. Then I saw the lights of the camp that showed me how I deviated from the path to it by a far margin. But something pleasant happened afterwards, I felt I conquered fear and my tolerance for unpleasant things got a big boost.

This is an awesome illustration of character development by trial, a thing lost in our modern culture. Thanks for the anecdote!

https://gwern.net/backstop#hui-nengs-flag -- Evolution as Backstop for Reinforcement Learning -- Hui Neng’s Flag -- the mathematics of positive and negative reinforcement

https://gwern.net/fiction/batman -- The Gift of the Amygdali -- Sci-Fi, anxiety, pain

To me very illustrative are the scans here - looks like Honnold's visual cortex (lighted up path at/from the back of the head) doesn't have [that good] connection to amygdala and thus no fear response:

https://nautil.us/the-strange-brain-of-the-worlds-greatest-s...

During burn out, I had utterly debilitating and constant anxiety. My brain was just a dial-tone and I could barely move or think.

Absolutely useless adaptation/response. Just made things worse.

An SNRI completely suppressed it.

I’m emerging from a multi decade relationship where my partner’s anxiety was so extreme it got into my subconscious.

Once I dropped concerns for their anxiety over the course of a year I discovered my original personality. I felt this personality was slowly degrading as I tried to relieve my partner’s anxiety.

I feel young again.

Empathy has second order side effects I guess. It's still better to be able to empathize than not. As a highly empathetic person myself, I had no choice but to dial it down as I got older. My first instinct at someones' misfortune is of course still one of empathy, but then I ask myself if there's anything I could do to help, if this person deserves it, though it could be an animal in pain. At this point, no matter what the answer is, the empathy signal is no longer useful, I turn it down all the way, think of something else, etc.

The single most impactful book on my mental health was Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence. The Amygdala chapters were truly life altering for me in helping me overcome a lot of childhood trauma. You learn how that little bit works, and how to reprogram it, and it's incredibly powerful. Not easy, but very powerful.

> The researchers took samples from brains of humans and rhesus macaque monkeys, separated individual cells and sequenced their RNA. This shows which genes are active (being expressed) in a particular cell and allows researchers to sort them into groups based on gene expression.

How do you extract RNA from monkeys without activating the RNA that expresses fear?

RNA is the messenger from the nucleus that tells the ribosome what to make.

The DNA sequences that create the RNA are called genes. It was only learned the last few decades that genes can be turned off/on. This is how a single embryo cell can produce all the different cells in our body. Unfortunately they chose the word expressed for this concept.

What they are saying is they want to study the amygdala aka the primitive pre-evolutionary part of our brain we share with other creatures. It is said the primitive brain controls breathing, heart rate,fear and anger. It is also said emotions like fear or anger is our brain’s faulty perception of our body’s response to all the adrenaline the amygdala is initiates.

They know the amygdala has different types of cells. To learn why certain cells malfunction, and cause depression and other disorders, they are studying DNA sequences.

The RNA doesn't express fear - it expresses that this is a type of cell that goes in a certain place in the neural circuit that expresses fear.

> How do you extract RNA from monkeys without activating the RNA that expresses fear?

You stroke the back of the monkey's hand and give it banana treats.

Little-known fact: amygdalae come in pairs. You have two of them.

Yes. My knowledge of neuroscience is derived mainly from articles like this and popular science books where many things are left vague.

If someone has a hippocampus or amygdala damaged or removed it's rarely specified whether its the left one, the right one, or both. Presumably it matters!

Both the above structures seem mysterious but I understand they both evolved from older cortex which sort of curled up over evolutionary time. 3-layer cortex rather than the 6-layer of the neocortex. I'd be glad to be corrected here.

The amygdala is associated with fear but it's concerned with desire too. Unwanted desires can be just as inconvenient as unwanted fears.

A classic source of confusion for me is the ubiquitous phrase 'brain circuits'. Is this a metaphor drawn from electronics, or what? 'Circuit' implies a loop but I assume they're just pathways.

In origin circ is a loop, but I'm quite sure brain circuits is an allusion on electronic circuits[] , which have pathways but not necessarily loops.

[] https://www.britannica.com/technology/electric-circuit

Anxiety is treated effectively and usually permanently by Schema Therapy [1] in a few months. Who would choose lifetime payments for pills?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_therapy

Every time the amygdalae come up, I always point out it affects almost all tings human: https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/13/1/43/4596542

Reminds me of this classic (funnily enough under the same domain) which the Independent linked under an article called "Disabling parts of the brain with magnets can weaken faith in God and change attitudes to immigrants, study finds":

https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/11/3/387/2375059

IIRC some study also found that right-wing people have noticeably larger amygdalae.

Probably from exercising it with anxiety.

I could see how a certain amount of anxiety can develop high achievers and too much could develop problems with analysis.

> Probably from exercising it with anxiety.

Or empathy with an imaginary self & kin.

Doesn’t that express as anxiety when the imaginary self, kin and reality don’t aligh.

Is a lie really a lie when you mean/believe it at the time?

Empathy trains the amygdala. So anything that causes anxiety in an empathy-trained amygdala 'originates' somewhere else, probably via modulation in parts of the CNS that deal with the specific stimulus that causes the impulse of fear which manifests via stress hormones and responses of heart, lung, neurotransmitter producing organs that cause muscle tension, (loss or gain of) clarity and sharpness of vision and so on.

So your brain perceives something. Or your body does. The effect is near instant. What do studies say about small and big amygdala people and speed of stress response in CNS? I'd have to check ...

I never mentioned lying. I believe the anxiety is from the confusion. I can understand how empathy can drive anxiety.

I have doubts that a person with imaginary self is capable of understanding another being well enough to be empathetic. I could perceive that the empathy the anxious one is declaring is a rationalization to enlist others in the promotion of the imaginary self.

Warning my only training in this area is life experience.

The imaginary self is the lie. And so is the perceived kinship. Empathy is liminal or a contract with conditions. "It's not the dogs fault" doesn't matter when he tries to rip off the finger-tip of a stranger who smelled like bad intentions. That's why people put dogs on leashes and or train them.

You are surrounded by people with imaginary selves, usually no more than one or two selves, so it's not really pathological and no cause for worry. And we all enlist others in the promotion of the in-group, which is an agreed upon imaginary construct we call collective.

And you are correct: most of 'them' have no empathy, most of them don't understand other beings well enough to be empathetic. Think productive people and hustlers and low earners who watch more TV than they learn after work.

But anyone understands their perceived kin. Even if the kinship breaks. Which brings me to

THE dominating and least perceived anxiety: will they betray me?

My partners, my colleagues, my wife, my customers, my boss, my government, the person I'm having a random conversation with, the producer of drug xyz, that salesman, my ISP, that news anchor and all of the individuals involved in those teams that make up departments and whole corporations and institutions. Will someone fuck up? All of that causes a build up of stress and, once the individual threshold is reached, anxiety.

But the average threshold is hard to reach because of defense mechanisms and compensations. Thus the amygdala gets trained and well nourished while the modulators loop through rollercoaster after rollercoaster.

I can see the false self as a lie but I can also see it as misperception of other’s intentions.

Developing response from stimulus in one environment and blindly applying it in other circumstances I see as dysfunction.

Maybe I misread it, but I don't think it says there's a universal root.

> The researchers took samples from brains of humans and rhesus macaque monkeys, separated individual cells and sequenced their RNA. This shows which genes are active (being expressed) in a particular cell and allows researchers to sort them into groups based on gene expression.

Thats (potentially) a lot of neurons to sift through isn't it? I wonder what their process was, or how many neurons they can sift through. Too bad the paywall (yay for greedy journal institutions profiting off the labor of scientists)

They most likely took a big batch of cells and used some chemical methods to separate them into groups, then blended up each group and analyzed it.

Are you familiar with a term that refers to that sort of technique?

tl:dr - brains are weird man

There's a tremendous episode of Radiolab called Fault Line that talks about the effect of a total resection of the Amygdala. It worked out very poorly. I heard it weeks before I was scheduled for a right temporal lobe resection, including Amygdala and it scared the bejeesus out of me. A quick call to my neurosurgeon's coordinator assuaged my fears.

The bilateral resection caused Kluver-Busey syndrome in the patient that Fault Line discusses.