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Your Complicated Amygdala: Why Brain-Imaging Work Is Misleading
The Atlantic: Brain-imaging studies have been painting an overly-simplistic picture of the how the brain works. It has even filtered into TV programming. In one episode of a popular legal drama, a character claimed to
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The Greater Your Fear, the Larger the Spider
LiveScience: Fear can distort our perceptions, psychological research indicates, and creepy-crawly spiders are no different. People who are afraid of spiders see the arachnids as bigger than they actually are, recent experiments have shown. Researchers
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The Wages of Eco-Angst
The New York Times: Even today, when media warnings about the latest health or safety risk are commonplace, the incessant drumbeat of reported environmental hazards can be truly alarming, leaving us worried, like the followers
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The Amygdala And Fear Are Not The Same Thing
In a 2007 episode of the television show Boston Legal, a character claimed to have figured out that a cop was racist because his amygdala activated – displaying fear, when they showed him pictures of
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Courage & cowardice
National Post: To psychologists, courage, like its opposite cowardice, is not an internal state of mind but an external process. It requires not only bravery, but also success, just as cowardice requires both fear and
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Fleeing the Brain’s Fear Center
Scientific “facts” often take on a life of their own. Scientists make legitimate and exciting new discoveries, with the best tools available to them in their time, and these findings get verified and modified and