How Your Brain Keeps You Out of Harm's Way Every Single Day

STARING INTO THE FACE OF TERROR WILL PREVENT YOU FROM BECOMING A VICTIM

The journal Science has recently published their report on people's mental and physical condition when they are being terrified by and image or an event when they are looking at it. This group of researchers wanted to know how fast somebody else would react if they were near a person who had that eye-widening expression of abject horror. Their studies concluded that your thought processes could pick up on that kind of fear within a literal split second.

Scientists believe that the reason we can pick up on somebody else's fear is because it could save our own lives to get out of the way of whatever the terrified person is fearful of. This goes all the way back to Neanderthal man, when a tiger or bear would lunge at a cave dweller and the other family members would have to fight off the attack or get killed themselves.

A fear-related structure in the brain called the amygdala is activated when somebody sees a terrified reaction from a bystander no matter what kind of mood they were in before. The amygdala could be described as an ancient structure found in all vertebrates. Some doctors have been studying their patients that have had massive brain injuries and have suffered damage to this part of their brain. These patients cannot actually tell by looking at someone who is being terrified that this is the emotion the person is expressing. This lack of understanding could in fact jeopardize their own lives one day.

AUTISM MAY BE A RESULT OF LOSS OF THE AMYGDALA

When the amygdala part of the brain fails to work, diseases such as autism might be the result of this malfunction, according to some new studies. On the opposite side of this, too much activity of the amygdala could actually result in anxiety disorders, according to a group of researchers.