Lesson 2 of 6 · The false alarm
Built to be fast and wrong
You have a threat detection system, and it does not work on evidence. It works on pattern. It fires first and checks later.
There is a reason it was built that way. Missing one real danger costs you everything. A hundred false alarms cost you an unpleasant afternoon. Given that arithmetic, a system that is fast and often wrong beats a system that is slow and usually right.
So the alarm goes off on a shape in the grass, on a tone in someone's voice, on an unread message from your manager. It is not making a claim about the world. It is making a guess, quickly.
That last part is one line of research rather than a settled map, and researchers argue about how much of it runs ahead of deliberate thought. What is not in dispute is that something fires before you have finished checking.
What the research says
There is a fast defensive response that can begin before you have finished deciding what you are looking at. That is why you can be reacting before you have decided anything.
Describes a rapid defensive circuit that can start a response before deliberate appraisal has finished.
LeDoux JE (2000). Emotion circuits in the brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 23, 155 to 184 doi
The body's defensive response and the conscious feeling of fear are not the same system. That is why your body can already be well ahead of you, and why it is not a failure of will that you cannot talk it down.
Separates the defensive response of the body from the conscious feeling of being afraid. They are not the same system, which is why the body can be well ahead of you.
LeDoux JE, Pine DS (2016). Using neuroscience to help understand fear and anxiety: a two-system framework. American Journal of Psychiatry, 173(11), 1083 to 1093 doi
These authors argue against the tidy single shortcut in the brain that the picture above suggests, and hold that many routes carry the signal. The teaching point survives it and the neat diagram does not, and you should know we know that.
The counterweight, printed here rather than left out. These authors argue that a single privileged shortcut in the human brain is not supported, and that many routes carry the signal. The teaching point survives it. The tidy diagram does not.
Pessoa L, Adolphs R (2010). Emotion processing and the amygdala: from a low road to many roads of evaluating biological significance. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(11), 773 to 782 doi