queen amygdala

on tuesday night's season premiere of House M.D., a young girl showed extraordinary courage in facing her impossibly dire situation. naturally, dr. house dismissed her bravery as unremarkable, going so far as to posit that the girl was not showing genuine, organic courage but rather that her courage was merely a "fake" emotion conjured by her damaged brain.

it was my first time watching a full episode of house. at first i was skeptical, but by the end i was hooked. and what made it all the more riveting was my freshly garnered understanding of brain anatomy. the amygdala is the so-called "fear center" of the brain. a clot in that region of the girl's brain, so the logic went, could have canceled her fear response, thereby explaining her intrepidness. but omar epps spotted the clot in her hippocampus, and so house was wrong, which he in the end grudgingly admitted.

however, according to the notes for a class i had today, projections from the hippocampus to the amygdala provide sensory information about the context of fearful stimuli, a sort of background picture as the brain tries to size up a scary situation. a lesion in this pathway should somehow erase certain components of fear, although which i do not know yet.