The Brain & All That

I was listening to this audio book about the brain, and I thought a few things were interesting. One was how the fear response starts, or how a phobia can start. It is a part of the brain that isn’t in the frontal lobe, but I don’t remember exactly what it’s called. It’s a smaller, more primitive part. It takes a broader look at a situation, and creates a fear response for everything similar to the feared object or situation. If being in a car accident was a fearful, traumatic event, then afterwards, hearing a car, when you aren’t in one, or seeing a car that looks similar to the one you were driving, triggers fear. It helps you avoid anything like a car accident in the future, even though it gets connected to all these other details. You can’t rationalize the fear response, because it’s in a different part of the brain, and is mainly an involuntary reaction. I think that’s interesting because it’s like two parts of your mind are struggling against each other, because you want to override the fear towards the general triggers that start the phobia. And there isn’t a way to do that.

Another interesting part was about autistics and how they are unable to read people and their emotional states. Most people can pick up on subtle variations in facial expressions, and know basically what the person’s emotional state is. Autistics aren’t focused on reading those subtle cues. Other people read those cues without really being aware of it. I guess the cues are coming so fast or they are processed on a different level than our conscious mind, so we aren’t deliberately trying to read the person’s emotional state most of the time. If autistics were to function more normally, they would have to learn to read people consciously, by memorizing what the facial expressions of a certain emotion look like. It makes me aware of how many things are going on in the brain that we aren’t conscious of, which seems to be the majority.

I’ve heard from people that even driving becomes like that, they are just going through the motions, like it’s happening in an automatic part of their brain. I’ve had that with walking, when I suddenly realize that I’m home already, without necessarily remembering how I got there. All the automatic functions our body does normally to keep us alive happen unconsciously, and even ones I wouldn’t have thought of like fear and social interactions. It surprises me sometimes that it all works so effectively and we usually don’t see any of these background processes working badly or sporadically.