Free Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love by Giovanni Frazzetto

another form (I will talk about this again in more detail in the next chapter).
    Fear conditioning
    Unfortunately, a bout of anxiety doesn’t always knock at our door. It ambushes us when we least expect it. However, it usually needs something to set it off and such a trigger can often seem innocuous.
    Also, worry begets a cascade of other worries, and hearing about recession, or any other trigger, can revive deeper concerns, which are often connected to memories of traumatic events, or more broadly to other unresolved conflicts or problems in our lives. The mechanism of the association between a trigger and the subsequent arrival of a fearful response has long been at the centre of research on fear and anxiety and is related to general theories of behavioural conditioning, which explore how organisms learn to behave in a certain way as a response to changes in their environment.
    You may be familiar with the famous experiment of the drooling dogs, conducted by the Russian scientist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, who in 1904 was awarded the Nobel Prize. Pavlov was using dogs to study the function and mechanisms of the digestive system. Just as our mouths water when we are in front of a succulent meal, when a dog encounters food its saliva starts to dribble. One day, Pavlov noticed that when he or his colleagues visited the dogs in the laboratory, the dogs started to salivate even when there was no food for them. It turned out that the dogs were reacting to the lab coats. Whenever the dogs were given food, the scientist offering them a meal was wearing a white lab coat, so the dogs had learnt to associate the white coat with the arrival of food. Later Pavlov changed the stimulus and struck a bell each time the dogs were fed. After a while, each time the dogs heard a bell, even in the absence of food, their saliva drooled.
    A typical laboratory fear-conditioning experiment goes like this: a rat or a mouse is placed in a cage and exposed to a trigger, often a buzzing tone, after which the animal receives a mild electric shock to the feet. The buzz works to condition the rodent to the arrival of the next shock. After a few of these pairings, the buzz acquires aversive properties and when presented to the animal it brings about typical behavioural and physiological fear responses. Most often, as soon as it hears the sound, the scared animal anticipates the shock by freezing.
    A rodent’s fear responses are similar to those of humans. We, too, freeze in our tracks. Imagine your reaction, for instance, when you hear your boss or partner pronounce those four laconic words: ‘we need to talk’. If you are anything like me, the normal reaction is to freeze for a moment like those caged rats, because we can be quite sure we are in for some trouble. Then blood circulation races, the heart starts to pound and so on, as described above. Our attention and concentration focus, we are on alert. For many of us, this is because the last time we heard those words we probably had a memorable fight. Those four words function like the buzz in the fear-conditioning experiment. Particularly if reminiscent of traumatic events, external cues like those threatening words can function as conditioned stimuli that trigger a variety of anxious responses. All of this takes energy. Fear and anxiety are draining.
    Anxiety in the brain
    Although conceptually distinct, fear and anxiety share their anatomical position in the brain, and twenty years and more of research have mapped their underlying neural circuits, almost down to the single neuron.

    Fig. 8 Anatomy of fear and anxiety
    The main region involved is the amygdala, the name being a Greek word which means almond. Appropriately shaped, the amygdala is located at the base of the brain, in the temporal lobe (Fig. 8). To have a better idea of where the amygdala is, imagine an arrow that goes straight through your eye and another that goes through your ear: their point of intersection is the position of the