Quotes from Joseph LeDoux

Once a genetic component has been established, the search for the genes involved can begin. This is a time-consuming and complex process that has recently been greatly facilitated by the information obtained by the Human Genome Project.51

Heritability in psychiatric disorders typically involves complex inheritance patterns controlled by multiple genes that interact with environmental factors to produce their results.

The fear structure is viewed as a program (in the sense of a computer program) for escaping or avoiding danger and includes several kinds of stored propositions: It includes propositions about threats—when the threat signal (CS) occurs, a bad thing (US) follows; propositions about physiological changes—when the CS occurs, I sweat and my heart beats faster; propositions

Through the topic of motivation, we begin to see the mental trilogy in action. A mind is not, as cognitive science has traditionally suggested, just a thinking device. It's an integrated system that includes, in the broadest possible terms, synaptic networks devoted to cognitive, emotional, and motivational functions. More important, it involves interactions between networks involved in different aspects of mental life.

Anxiety, in short, is a conscious feeling. It can arise in a bottom-up way, driven by activity in defensive circuits or from higher processes that conceptualize worry, either about an uncertain future or about existence itself.

Self-knowledge is certainly a significant aspect of human motivation, but even animals that are not self-aware, or at least not robustly aware of who they are the way a human is, are motivated to do things-they seek food and shelter and avoid predators and injury. Much of what we humans do is also influenced by processes that percolate along outside of awareness. Consciousness is important, but so are the underlying cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes that work unconsciously.

The general view that prefrontal and parietal networks are required for conscious perceptual experiences is supported by studies of patients as they begin to recover from coma.157 They first transition to a vegetative state in which the brain stem and basal forebrain networks of arousal are functionally active, but the frontal and parietal networks are not. Although

Language is not just a system for talking and reading. Talking and reading reflect the cognitive elaborations brought into the brain by language.

The same network is suppressed in states of hypnosis, in which the person is fully awake and responsive, but external awareness is altered (by way of hypnotic suggestion, attention to certain stimuli can be diminished).

When a person is worried, working memory is occupied and decreases one's ability to perform effectively and efficiently.

psychological constructs fall under five broad functional domains or systems: negative valence systems (e.g., threat processing), positive valence systems (reward processing), cognitive systems (e.g., attention, perception, memory, working memory, executive function), arousal and regulatory systems (e.g., brain arousal, circadian rhythm, motivation), and social processing systems (e.g., attachment, separation).

I quoted Menand's restatement of Kierkegaard: Anxiety is the price humans pay for freedom. My restatement of Kierkegaard and Menand is that anxiety is the price humans pay for autonoetic consciousness.

Changing the content of our memories or altering their emotional tonalities, however desirable to alleviate guilty or painful consciousness, could subtly reshape who we are, at least to ourselves. With altered memories we might feel better about ourselves, but it is not clear that the better-feeling 'we' remain the same as before." —PRESIDENT'S COUNCIL ON BIOETHICS

Technically, it is correct that extinction can't be used to help people cope with problems that are not based on learning because what it does is induce new learning that competes with the original learning. But

Habituation is a form of nonassociative learning because it involves a single stimulus that has an innate or otherwise preexisting capacity to affect behavior. For example, a loud noise elicits a startle reflex the first time it occurs, but this ability weakens with repetition. Extinction,

It should be noted that psychological processes and learning experiences are, in the end, also biological in nature, because they are products of the brain and as such are also subject to genetic influences and the influence of gene-environment interactions, or what is called epigenetics.

In order for extinction to reduce the ability of a Pavlovian CS to elicit defense responses, the amygdala's control over these responses has to be changed. Key to this process is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (PFCVM) and its ability to regulate the amygdala-housed circuits that store the CS-US memory, which when activated results in the expression of defense responses. The

My notion of personality is pretty simple: it's that your "self," the essence of who you are, reflects patterns of interconnectivity between neurons in your brain.

The third factor listed by Barlow is specific learning experiences. If a child is given excessive attention when ill, he may continue to use "sick behaviors" as a way to attract attention and sympathy. Similarly, if a child observes a parent or other adults using such strategies, he might adopt them as well.

Morgan then examined the effects of PFCVM lesions in rats and found that, again, the animals could not stop freezing in response to the CS. It was as if removal of PFCVM influences resulted in an out-of-control amygdala, one that responded to stimuli that were, objectively speaking, no longer threatening. This immediately suggested that the type of unregulated fear and anxiety that occurs in people with anxiety disorders might involve some dysregulation of prefrontal-amygdala circuits. It

Prolonged exposure therapy, a variant of flooding, attempts to maintain a high level of fear arousal, but its key premise is that all aspects of fear, as defined by Lang's three response systems (behavioral avoidance, physiological responses, and verbal behavior), have to be reduced in order for exposure to be effective.

As soon as there is life there is danger." —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

A major way that threats change arousal is via outputs of the CeA to neuromodulatory systems (Figure 8.7).73 (By the way, the amygdala also processes appetitive stimuli and the CeA also activates neuromodulatory systems in their presence74). The consequence of CeA activation of neuromodulatory systems is an increase in attention and vigilance, which may be achieved by lowering the threshold to detect sensory stimuli.

So how does the new learning that occurs in extinction (learning of the CS–no US association) prevent the expression of the original memory (CS-US association) and the defense responses it controls? To