"You do this because you’re afraid. Even without direct evidence of danger, you’re compelled to flee, to protect yourself. Why this compulsion? It’s the work of your amygdala, a tiny almond–shaped structure in your brain."
“You could call the amygdala a relevance detector,”
An important function of the brain is to scan one’s surroundings for the presence of biologically relevant features (e.g., stimuli that represent a threat to well-being) and grant them priority in access to attention, awareness, and, ultimately, action.
Recent discoveries about the neural system and cellular mechanisms in pathways mediating classical fear conditioning have provided a foundation for pursuing concurrent connectionist models of this form of emotional learning. The models described are constrained by the known anatomy underlying the behavior being simulated. To date, implementations capture salient features of fear learning, both at the level of behavior and at the level of single cells, and additionally make use of generic biophysical constraints to mimic fundamental excitatory and inhibitory transmission properties. Owing to the modular nature of the systems model, biophysical modeling can be carried out in a single region, in this case the amygdala. Future directions include application of the biophysical model to questions about temporal summation in the two sensory input paths to amygdala, and modeling of an attentional interrupt signal that will extend the emotional processing model to interactions with cognitive systems.
The central nervous system is a serial information processor that must serve an organism endowed with multiple needs, and living in an en- vironment that presents unpredictable threats and opportunities. These requirements are met by 2 mechanisms: (a) goal-terminating mechanisms, permitting goals to be processed serially without any 1 monopolizing the processor, (b) interruption mechanism, having the properties usually ascribed to emotion, allowing the processor to respond to urgent needs in real time. Mechanisms of these kinds, to control the direction of attention and activity, have been incorporated in some in- formation-processing theories of human cognition, and their further elaboration will permit these theories to explain wider ranges of behavior.