How the Amygdala Works

The amygdala detects important features of the environment and it can trigger the fight or flight response. This brain region used to be thought of as the brain’s ‘fear center’ or sometimes as the emotional core of the brain, but in recent years neuroscientists have discovered that the amygdala’s function is more general. It now appears that the amygdala’s function is to detect important and relevant features of our sensory experience, and it activates most strongly when those features are unexpected. More specifically, the amygdala can be thought of as a prediction error detector which is sensitive to things that are biologically relevant and/or important for the task at hand. This video explains how the amygdala works, including a discussion of amygdaloid nuclei anatomy, how the fight or flight response works and how the amygdala triggers it, how the amygdala can be “hijacked” and lead us to doing things we later regret, and how we can calm our amygdalae if we experience the amygdala hijack often.