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PTSD And Its Effects On The Amygdala

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PTSD is a real medical condition. It is the brain’s natural biochemical reaction to an abnormally stressful situation or series of stressful situations. It all begins with a person perceiving a situation in such a way as to create fear, which in turn begins the fight or flight response. When you have fear, your brain immediately goes to work sending the information on two different paths simultaneously. One path is extremely fast and is designed to react first, ask questions later; ‘better safe than sorry’ is the amygdala’s motto. The other path takes its time analyzing the information and comparing it to things in memory and paying attention to other possible clues. When your senses detect a sound, motion, or smell, they send this information to the thalamus. The thalamus doesn’t know if …show more content…
The amygdala receives the information and quickly scans it to determine if it is a threat and starts action to protect you.
In the PTSD injured brain, the amygdala, the brain’s sentinel, has a privileged position in the perception due to its unique ability to see everything coming into the brain (Goleman, 2007). The amygdala is the alarm portion of the brain and will detect features from current circumstances to determine if they are close enough to past emotionally significant events to warrant an emotional alarm. It knows nothing about reasoning or cognitive functions; it deals with feelings and emotions. The amygdala is a hair-trigger that makes rapid judgements about a situation and has a powerful effect on our emotions and behavior, linked with our survival needs. This survival mechanism, the fight or flight response, lets us react to our

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