Shedding new light into how our brain recognizes danger

Our existence depends on our evolved ‘fight or flight’ response, but where in our brain does the first signal to activate the response emerge?

A recent study conducted by Associate Professor Bo Li and post doctorate fellow Mario Penzo at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), and Jason Tucciarone of Stony Brook University. Their paper titled "The paraventricular thalamus controls a central amygdala fear circuit” uses mouse models to identify the life-preserving circuit that is responsible for identifying and remembering threats. It is here, that our brain sends a signal to start our ‘fight or flight’ response.

The first thing the research team looked at was the thalamus; focusing on the area of the brain (Paraventricular Nucleus or PVT) which is readily activated by physical and psychological stressors. They simulated danger through the use of weak electrical foot shocks and observed the results. From this experiment, the researchers confirmed that the PVT was incredibly sensitive to danger/threats. They found that PVT plays a large role in conditioning the mice to fear certain scenarios; and these fears were remembered by the mouse; demonstrating that this knowledge was hard wired into the neuronal synapses. This study is long from proving anything in humans, but it may shed some light into how we might recognize, deal with and remember danger/threats.