Amygdalae, Used Once, Work Vastly Better

A reader emailed an article on a study:

Eight passengers on Air Transat Flight 236 (AT 236), which narrowly avoided an ocean crash, recalled the experience at the University of Toronto’s Rotman Research Institute while MRI scanners monitored their brains. They also recounted another emotionally charged event, the 9/11 attacks, and a neutral occurrence, such as a recent road trip.

Survivors’ recollections, scans revealed, triggered increased activation in brain regions linked to emotional memory, including the amygdala, medial temporal lobe, anterior and posterior midline and visual cortex.

Researchers saw a “traumatic memory enhancement effect” in AT 236 survivors, who remembered sights, sounds and other episodic details from the event to a great degree. Compared to other study participants who had not experienced trauma firsthand, passengers also demonstrated heightened recall of 9/11, which occurred weeks after their brush with death. Survivors’ recollections, scans revealed, triggered increased activation in brain regions linked to emotional memory, including the amygdala, medial temporal lobe, anterior and posterior midline and visual cortex.

The results, authors write, suggest that trauma leaves an imprint on the brain that alters how we process information and emotion, perhaps making us more attuned to subsequent negative occurrences.

Rabbits, who have avoided threat their whole lives, literally can’t remember experiences as well as K-selected humans. They are basically the people in Groundhog Day who do not know that they are living the same day over and over, every day of their lives, and never learning anything in the process. We are the people who know what is going to happen because we have seen it all before. You can see why we get frustrated. It is the same day – we saw all this already – don’t you idiots ever learn?

The good news is, exposure to trauma turns on the amygdala, and coverts many rabbits into wolves – and those wolves will hate the rabbits whose stupidity resulted in their trauma. But there are two sides to that.

The good news is there will be a lot of trauma when the collapse hits, and idiot rabbits are packed like sardines among the vibrant populations – populations who have spent the last few years being taught by the media that white people owe them, savaging whitey is fun, and cops deserve to die. That will mean epic numbers of wolves being created to help us reverse the rabbit madness.

The downside is that after the smoke clears a lot of people are going to be walking around with PTSD, and drawing guns and freaking out every time somebody drops a fork. I can’t really imagine that will be helpful to recreating civilization 2.0…

But one problem at time.

Apocalypse cometh™