Amit Etkin
speaker
111 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2005
last heard Mar 2015
Amit Etkin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So we expected activity there.
What we wanted to do, however, was break apart the amygdala, which is a very complex structure.
into sub regions.
It's amazing
Yeah.
We broke it up into two regions, but really has about thirteen different regions.
And we know from a lot of animal work that those regions are very, very different.
There's regions that are important in getting your sympathetic nervous system, your sort of heart rate and sweating going, and there's parts of the amygdala that are important in getting attention oriented to a threat.
what
So we found that consciously presenting these fearful faces led to activity in one part of the amygdala associated with that heart rate and sweating response.
Every person, no matter what their anxiety was, activated this part similarly.
When you looked at the unconscious activity though, a different picture emerged.
There you had activity in a second brain region, which is important for helping direct attention.
That part of the brain was related to anxiety.
Well, we found that unconsciously you have this whole network in the brain being activated.
So the amygdala signals that there's some sort of threat, more so in more anxious people.
And to understand that threat, to resolve that threat, it recruits all these other regions all over the cortex, all of which kind of went to this vigilance idea that the anxious people are always trying to look out for a threat and have an
enhanced processing of that threat to the point where they can actually improve their behavior and maybe detect and respond to the threat better.
The problem is when it becomes too much and you can't be flexible with it, you can't regulate it, that's when it becomes potentially a disease.
Maybe post traumatic stress disorder, but any anxiety disorder seems to fit that bill.
Showing 81–100 of 111 · page 5 of 6
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