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Factoring Fear: What Scares Us and Why - Scientic American

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Factoring Fear: What Scares Us and Why

Scientists scan the brain in an attempt to explain the hows and whys of being afraid-very afraid
By Lou Dzierzak on October 27, 2008

Credit: Courtesy of iStockphoto; Copyright: Ryan Lane

What's scarier, a deadly snake slithering across your path during a hike or
watching a 1,000-point drop in the stock market? Although both may instill
fear, researchers disagree over the nature and cause of this very powerful

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emotion.

"When you see the stock market fall 1,000 points, that's the same as seeing a
snake," says Joseph LeDoux, professor of neuroscience and psychology the
Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety based at New York University.
"Fear is the response to the immediate stimuli. The empty feeling in your gut,
the racing of your heart, palms sweating, the nervousnessthat's your brain
responding in a preprogrammed way to a very specific threat."

LeDoux adds: "Since our brains are programmed to be similar in structure, we

can assume that what I experience when I'm threatened is something similar to
what you experience."

Fear even affects different species in similar ways. "We come into the world
knowing how to be afraid, because our brains have evolved to deal with nature,"
LeDoux says, noting that the brains of rats and humans respond in similar ways
to threats, even though the threat itself might be completely different.

Other researchers find fear to be a vastly personal experience. Whereas some

people become terrified watching a scary film, others may be more afraid to
walk back to their cars in a dark parking lot after the movie ends.

If you ask a group of people to catalogue the things that make them afraid, you
are likely to get a very different list from each person, says Michael Lewis,
director of the Institute for the Study of Child Development at Robert Wood
Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J. "Introspectively, we can agree
that fears of an IRS [Internal Revenue Service] audit or mugging may feel the
same," he says. "The problem is we don't have a good physiological measure of
fear or any emotion."

He notes that the behavior of people around us may influence our responses to

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threatening situations. "We learn to become fearful through experience with the
fear event, or learning from those people around us like our parents, our
siblings, our colleagues," Lewis says. "Fear has a certain contagious feature to it,
so the fear in others can elicit fear in ourselves. It's conditioning, like Pavlov
and the salivating dog."

Other researchers turn to technology to help them better understand

trepidation. "It's very hard to define that emotion in terms of the feeling it
evokes," says Joy Hirsch, professor of functional neuroradiology, neuroscience
and psychology, and director of the program for Imaging and Cognitive
Sciences at Columbia University in New York City. "Can you define what pain
is? Can you define what the color red is? These are the essential sensations that
represent the hardest problems in neuroscience."

To find out more about what keeps us up at night, Hirsch and her team use
fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to probe how our brains are
wired. "The circuitry that underlies the sensation of fear is quite readily
activated with a specific stimuli," Hirsch says. In her research, subjects are
shown a photograph of another person's face with a frightened look. A standard
library of stimuli to elicit fear activity uses actors to make facial gestures that
communicate fearfulness.

In the fMRI research, the reaction to fear-inducing stimuli shows up in the

amygdala, an almond-size mass beneath the temporal lobe also known as the
brain's fear center. Hirsch says the amygdala is the first responder to
threatening stimuli.

The fMRI scanner tracks the change in blood flow to the amygdala. "We are
looking at signal changes in particular parts of the brain," Hirsch says, "The
signal means increased neural activity." The magnetic resonance signal is
responding to the amount of blood that is being recruited to the local area. The
photograph of a fearful face elicits a greater amount of blood flow and a higher

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signal during the scanning period than a neutral face photograph."

Critics of fMRI-based research point out that it is not always clear what the flow
of blood in a brain region means. But Hirsch dismisses naysayers. "We use very
carefully chosen stimuli that don't necessarily scare people [who are] in the
scanner, but arouse systems that are involved in fear activity if you were
scared," she says. "The interpretation of another fearful face arouses the system
of neural regions that respond to fear in the observer."

Hirsch notes that the amygdala responds to more than just facial expressions.
"If you were in a dark alley and something scary jumped out at you," she says,
"it would be the amygdala that would contribute to your decision to run."

Fear is as basic a human process as breathing or digestion, yet science's ability

to completely understand and describe it remains elusive. "That is the $64,000
question," Lewis says, noting that despite more than 100 studies into how the
body reacts to fear, there still is no way to quantify fear itself.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

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editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers.

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