Fear

Fear kept your ancestors alive. Now it is keeping you from living.

Fear is the most powerful emotion the human brain generates. It overrides hunger, social obligation, and rational thought in milliseconds. It shapes behaviour more completely and more reliably than any other state the nervous system can produce. And for approximately one in three people, it stops working properly - firing too often, too intensely, at the wrong targets - producing the anxiety disorders that are the most prevalent mental health conditions in the world.

In this revelatory account, Nathan K. Voss draws on four decades of fear neuroscience to explain exactly what fear is, how it is built in the brain, why it goes wrong, and what the science says about setting it right.

Spanning ten chapters across four parts, this book covers:

• The amygdala - the almond-shaped structure whose millisecond-fast alarm system has been protecting organisms from predators for hundreds of millions of years, and what happens when it cannot be turned off
• How fear is learned - the Pavlovian conditioning of the fear circuit, why some fears are acquired from a single experience, and why knowing something is irrational does not make it less terrifying
• The body of fear - the full physiological cascade that the activated fear circuit produces, from racing heart to trembling muscles, and what this means for treatment
• Anxiety - when the alarm system becomes chronically overactive, and the neuroscience of what maintains it
• Phobias - why the most common specific fears cluster around snakes, spiders, heights, and social evaluation, and what this reveals about evolutionary biology
• PTSD - why traumatic fear memories are encoded differently from ordinary memories, and why this makes them so resistant to the passage of time
• Panic disorder - the suffocation false alarm theory, and why the most effective treatment for panic attacks involves deliberately inducing the sensations that trigger them
• Social anxiety - the most prevalent and most under-treated anxiety disorder, and why the fear of negative evaluation is the most deeply wired of all human fears
• The fear of death - terror management theory, and what the unique human awareness of mortality does to everything else we think, feel, and do
• Unlearning fear - the neuroscience of extinction learning, reconsolidation, pharmacological enhancement of therapy, and the brave brain