The second chapter of Mind Wide Open is called "The Sum Of My Fears" -- it's a personal tour of that most heavily charted pathway in the brain's emotional system: the fear response. If you've read my Discover article on fear, you'll be familiar with most of the basics. (For the purposes of this post, you really need only know that the fear system relies extensively on a part of the brain called the amygdala.) As I do throughout the book, I try in this chapter to connect the science to everyday life -- to my everyday life, more often than not, since that's the everyday life I happen to know the most about.
What I've found is that looking at yourself through the brain science lens doesn't just help you understand what's going on behind the scenes -- it actually helps you see new attributes of your personality or your behavior, or helps you put your finger on something about yourself you'd sensed intuitively, but hadn't fully grappled with. The Fear chapter is filled with examples of this, but here's a particular favorite of mine:
The other intriguing property of fear learning is what some brain scientists call "flashbulb memory." During traumatic events, your brain stores not only a trace of the specific threat -- the snake, or the oncoming car, or the rattle of AK-47 fire -- but also contextual details that surround that threat. This is a classic example of the brain's associative architecture...
Think of a traumatic event from your own past, one that involves a sudden danger, like a car accident. You no doubt remember the immediate threat -- headlights bearing down on you, or a screeching tire -- but most likely you also possess a number of extraneous memories: the song playing on the car stereo at the moment of impact, the color of the early-evening sky, the confused expression on the face of an onlooking pedestrian. None of those details actually seem functionally related to the threat posed by two cars colliding with each other, and yet when you hear the song five months later, you can feel the fear response welling up inside you...
Once again, a lack of discrimination has a potential adaptive value. In life-or-death situations, you never know where relevant information might lie. The sound of brook babbling in a forest isn't relevant to the rattlesnake threat, but a rattling sound emphatically is. Our brains are designed during traumatic events to take note of all the sensory inputs, albeit in a low-resolution form -- on the off chance that some stray element will turn out to be a good predictor of future threats. If that means we have an irrational fear of babbling brooks in the future, and an entirely rational fear of rattling, so be it. The irrational fear won't kill us, but not acquiring the rational fear very well might.
This, too, is a kind of thinking. In the months after 9/11, I started noticing a subtle, but predictable, shift in my general levels of Manhattan-dwelling anxiety. Crisp, clear weather made me more nervous than overcast days. For a long time, I thought this was purely extraneous associative learning: Sept. 11 itself had been a spectacularly clear day, which is one reason why my memories of standing on Greenwich Street and watching the towers burn was so vivid -- there was no moisture or smog in the air to block the view. And so when similar weather elevated my anxiety levels, I thought of it as being like that song on the radio during the car accident: a stray detail, unrelated to the real threat, that nevertheless becomes associated with the fear memory.
But then one day, while walking along the same path I had followed on the morning of the 11th, I had a small epiphany. I realized that my amygdala had stumbled across a clue that hadn't occurred to my rational brain. Forget about all the other threats that arose in the public imagination after 9/11 -- Anthrax and dirty bombs and smallpox -- and think exclusively of the specific assault that took place on that horrible day. If the threat that your brain is trying to protect you from is hijacked airplanes flying into skyscrapers by visual flight rules, then cloudy days are probably less dangerous than clear ones. It's hard enough to hit a building without a flight plan in perfect weather; it's almost impossible to do it when half the building is concealed by fog. If the imminent danger was an exact replay of the 9/11 attacks, there was nothing irrational about being more anxious on sunny days.
I made a number of deliberate, conscious evaluations of potential threats post 9/11 -- I avoided densely populated parts of the city and tall buildings whenever possible. I drove or took the train when traveling along the Eastern Seaboard, forswearing the shuttle flights that had been such a staple of my life over the previous decade. These were deliberate strategies for dealing with a possible attack, developed by analyzing the patterns of a past one. But my amygdala was also evaluating the danger as well, and creating its own strategies. And one of those strategies was: be on the lookout during nice weather. Of course, the amygdala wasn't actually working through the logic on its own; it simply stored a flashbulb memory of that day, and one of the elements illuminated was the brilliant blue sky. When my amygdala subsequently encountered similar skies, it set off an alarm. I had missed the connection between the weather and the attacks in my subjective appraisal of that nightmare day. But my amygdala hadn't.
