Indiana Jones and the Overactive Amygdala
For Indiana Jones, there was no villain as menacing and no foe as treacherous as the writhing snakes in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Audiences saw their archaeologist champion paralyzed by fear and almost vanquished by his reptilian adversary. Heroic Indy is not alone! Approximately one third of adults report being ophidiophobic, or terrified of even the thought of snakes. The laboratory of Dr. Öhman at the Karolinska Institute examines how evolutionarily engrained fear-relevant stimuli (i.e. pictures of snakes) influence attention and emotion. If Indiana Jones had been a subject, it is likely that in response to pictures of snakes he would have exhibited a strong psychophysiological response, including an accelerated heart rate, increased blood pressure, enhanced skin conductance, and activation of the startle reflex [1]. It is easy to be sympathetic to Indy’s condition, since we know that attacks by venomous snakes can be fatal. It is more challenging to understand why a picture of a snake – and not just the snake itself – can invoke such a powerful physiological reaction.
Fear is defined as an activated aversive emotional state that motivates an organism to cope with threatening stimuli. Defensive mechanisms often include freezing, escape, or attack. It is thought that fear is controlled by evolutionarily-conserved systems in the brain, primarily the amygdalaA collection of nuclei found in the temporal lobe. The amygd....


1. Öhman A. (2005). The role of the amygdala in human fear: Automatic detection of threat,Psychoneuroendocrinology, 30 (10) 953-958. DOI: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2005.03.019
2. Parsons R.G. & Ressler K.J. (2013). Implications of memory modulation for post-traumatic stress and fear disorders, Nature Neuroscience, 16 (2) 146-153. DOI: 10.1038/nn.3296
3. Mahan A.L. & Ressler K.J. (2012). Fear conditioning, synaptic plasticity and the amygdala: implications for posttraumatic stress disorder, Trends in Neurosciences, 35 (1) 24-35. DOI:10.1016/j.tins.2011.06.007
Images adapted from http://themeanestmom.blogspot.com/ and from [3].
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GREAT post — just back-linked it to “Open Loops, Distractions and Attentional Dysregulation” on ADDandSoMuchMore.com – another of your posts is linked there as well.
Good stuff here – following you.
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Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CMC, SCAC, MCC
– ADD Coach Training Field founder; ADD Coaching co-founder –
(blogs: ADDandSoMuchMore, ADDerWorld & ethosconsultancynz – dot com)
“It takes a village to educate a world!”
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