LeDoux's work with fear/amygdala learning: a link?

• sex addiction by cf, 12/31/98
  • Experiential contributors by Shapiro, 1/1/99
    
    

I have been reading about the work Joseph LeDoux has been doing re learning/emotion/fear reactions, and the pathway he has mapped that demonstrates direct learning and subsequent response from stimulus reception through the auditory thalamus and auditory cortex directly to the amygadala--stimulus which triggers a "nine-alarm alert" to the bodies physiological stress reactions, all taking place while the message is still in the process of being transmitted to the neocortex and back down to the amygdala. This information processing system is newly discovered, and only beginning to be understood (certainly barely understood by me, but also by researchers, who have used "?" to indicate the next step in some of the processes). I have been excited by the information because it appears to me to be a possible source of the physiological foundation for the therapeutic effect of EMDR and the source of the reaction/symptoms of PTSD, and even helps explain what some have called "body memories". Learning at the level of the amygdala, from signals which had been sent directly into the amygdala, would not respond to neocortex level verbal therapies--or so I would think might be possible. Have you read/studied this, and what do you think? (LeDoux's review in Scientific American is a good overview. He alludes to PTSD symptoms himself in that article.)

• LeDoux's work with fear/amygdala learning: a link? by Uri Bergmann, LCSW, BCD, 1/12/99