Heather Berlin

Neuroscientist, clinical psychologist.

Yeah.

Most amazing people are born in Mount Sinai.

They don't have that in Philly.

They don't have them outside of Philly.

The amygdala is a key brain region involved in fear, but it's this, I think a lot of people think that fear lives in the amygdala, and that's not quite how it works.

The amygdala is more like the smoke alarm.

It detects something happening in the environment.

It says, danger, danger, something could be happening.

We need to gear up.

So then it activates other parts of the brain, which then decide whether we need to sort of act on this or not.

So it's a trigger.

It's a trigger.

It's sort of an alarm response that can be trained to either sort of be louder or to kind of dampen down, depending on our experience.

So it's a bit of both.

We are actually born, and research has shown that we're born with certain predispositions, evolutionarily sort of programmed, that we're more likely to be fearful of certain things like spiders or heights, right, because of our history and our interaction with them, than we are, to say, of electrical sockets.

Right.

So, I mean, there's a bit of both, though, because you can also learn fears, right?

By either watching something happen to someone else or having an experience yourself.

Let's say you get into a bad car accident.