Figures
Fear (not)!
Fear is a basic survival mechanism shaped during evolution to protect us from dangerous situations. We learn to fear threats, but also to forget them. However, forgetting fear is not mere unlearning, but is in fact masking of fear memories. In this computational study Vlachos et al. (doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000038) propose a mechanism that explains how different neural populations in the basal amygdala may evoke or suppress fear responses depending on the particular environment in which fear-related stimuli appear.
Image Credit: Carlos Toledo and Gunnar Grah, Bernstein Center Freiburg, Germany
Citation: (2011) PLoS Computational Biology Issue Image | Vol. 7(3) March 2011. PLoS Comput Biol 7(3): ev07.i03. https://doi.org/10.1371/image.pcbi.v07.i03
Published: March 31, 2011
Copyright: © 2011 Toledo and Grah. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Fear is a basic survival mechanism shaped during evolution to protect us from dangerous situations. We learn to fear threats, but also to forget them. However, forgetting fear is not mere unlearning, but is in fact masking of fear memories. In this computational study Vlachos et al. (doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000038) propose a mechanism that explains how different neural populations in the basal amygdala may evoke or suppress fear responses depending on the particular environment in which fear-related stimuli appear.
Image Credit: Carlos Toledo and Gunnar Grah, Bernstein Center Freiburg, Germany