An Ancient Brain Mechanism May Help Explain Anxiety And PTSD |
An Ancient Brain Mechanism May Help Explain Anxiety And PTSD
Researchers think it may be a “normal survival mechanism gone into overdrive”.
Anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are believed to affect 10% and 4% of the UK population, respectively.
Though the conditions are distinct, they have a feature in common: both anxiety and PTSD can make us enter “fight-or-flight” mode in situations that may not objectively warrant this response.
For a long time, scientists have thought that fear – an “innate” emotion experts think humans inherited from our mammalian ancestors – is actually a survival system that evolved to help us to distinguish and appropriately react to danger.
But a new paper published in Nature Neuroscience suggests this isn’t always true – especially........