such as the granting of land to a township, an important wedding or negotiations between powerful families. To accomplish this, a young child about seven years old was selected, instructed to observe the proceedings carefully, and then thrown into a river. In this way, it was said, the memory of the event would be impressed on the child and the record of the event maintained for the child’s lifetime.” 4
One of the breakthroughs in understanding the link between fear and memory came in 1911, when Swiss neurologist and psychologist Édouard Claparède came across an amnesiac patient in a Geneva clinic. The woman retained all her old memories but was unable to create new ones. Though Claparède greeted her each day, she never remembered him; each time he entered her room, it was like a first meeting in which he had tointroduce himself all over again. One day, he hid a pin in his hand and reached out to shake her hand, pricking her. The next day, as usual, she did not remember him. But when he went to shake her hand, she withheld it, recognizing a threat. 5
That’s because fear learning is laid down in the amygdala, separately from the learning of people’s names, the Pythagorean theorem, or how to drive a stick shift. Most long-term memories reside in the hippocampus, where they have a tendency to weaken and dissolve over time. That little seahorse in the brain is one of the first regions affected by Alzheimer’s disease. But fear memories can’t afford to weaken, turn fallible, or go up in smoke. Our survival as a species depends on our ability to remember that the touch of a flame destroys, the bite of a rattlesnake is shot through with poison, and a charging hyena has murder on the brain. Sometimes there are no second chances. Evolution has done all it can to ensure that fear memories remain unshakable—“implicit” in neuroscience lingo, “unconscious” in Freudian. The amygdala is what keeps them that way. The stronger the emotional response signaled by the amygdala, the better the chance we’ll remember it. With a single bad experience, we can become conditioned to fear things that are totally harmless. And it doesn’t matter whether the threat is external or internal, real or imagined: The brain responds the same.
That fact begs a critical question: If fear learning is so powerful, how realistic is it to hope to overcome a lifetime of stage fright? Can the hapless musician or nerve-ridden actor retrain his or her amygdala and so reclaim some degree of poise? Or is it a fool’s errand, destined to fail because of thevery nature of fear acquisition? Scientists are addressing the broader question of whether fear can be reversed. Much of the research is funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, which has an obvious interest in the extinction of traumatic memories. Nearly three hundred thousand veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Health care for a veteran with PTSD costs three and a half times as much as it does for one without the disorder. The human and financial toll is overwhelming, with medical care costs exceeding $2 billion. But the government’s research holds potential far beyond the military. Anxiety disorders represent the most common mental illness in the country. They affect 18 percent of the adult population, or forty million people, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. In addition to PTSD, they include obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and social phobia (of which performance anxiety is a subset).
The most common form of treatment is known as “extinction training.” In the laboratory, the idea is simple enough: Stop shocking the poor rat whenever it hears the tone and then repeat that pattern again and again and again—as many times as it takes for the animal to learn that the tone doesn’t necessarily signal pain. Had LeDoux repeated his routine enough times,
One of the breakthroughs in understanding the link between fear and memory came in 1911, when Swiss neurologist and psychologist Édouard Claparède came across an amnesiac patient in a Geneva clinic. The woman retained all her old memories but was unable to create new ones. Though Claparède greeted her each day, she never remembered him; each time he entered her room, it was like a first meeting in which he had tointroduce himself all over again. One day, he hid a pin in his hand and reached out to shake her hand, pricking her. The next day, as usual, she did not remember him. But when he went to shake her hand, she withheld it, recognizing a threat. 5
That’s because fear learning is laid down in the amygdala, separately from the learning of people’s names, the Pythagorean theorem, or how to drive a stick shift. Most long-term memories reside in the hippocampus, where they have a tendency to weaken and dissolve over time. That little seahorse in the brain is one of the first regions affected by Alzheimer’s disease. But fear memories can’t afford to weaken, turn fallible, or go up in smoke. Our survival as a species depends on our ability to remember that the touch of a flame destroys, the bite of a rattlesnake is shot through with poison, and a charging hyena has murder on the brain. Sometimes there are no second chances. Evolution has done all it can to ensure that fear memories remain unshakable—“implicit” in neuroscience lingo, “unconscious” in Freudian. The amygdala is what keeps them that way. The stronger the emotional response signaled by the amygdala, the better the chance we’ll remember it. With a single bad experience, we can become conditioned to fear things that are totally harmless. And it doesn’t matter whether the threat is external or internal, real or imagined: The brain responds the same.
That fact begs a critical question: If fear learning is so powerful, how realistic is it to hope to overcome a lifetime of stage fright? Can the hapless musician or nerve-ridden actor retrain his or her amygdala and so reclaim some degree of poise? Or is it a fool’s errand, destined to fail because of thevery nature of fear acquisition? Scientists are addressing the broader question of whether fear can be reversed. Much of the research is funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, which has an obvious interest in the extinction of traumatic memories. Nearly three hundred thousand veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Health care for a veteran with PTSD costs three and a half times as much as it does for one without the disorder. The human and financial toll is overwhelming, with medical care costs exceeding $2 billion. But the government’s research holds potential far beyond the military. Anxiety disorders represent the most common mental illness in the country. They affect 18 percent of the adult population, or forty million people, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. In addition to PTSD, they include obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and social phobia (of which performance anxiety is a subset).
The most common form of treatment is known as “extinction training.” In the laboratory, the idea is simple enough: Stop shocking the poor rat whenever it hears the tone and then repeat that pattern again and again and again—as many times as it takes for the animal to learn that the tone doesn’t necessarily signal pain. Had LeDoux repeated his routine enough times,
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