My Research Question – Fear in the brain: How is the Amygdala connected to fear? And if damaged what naturally replaces fear in the human brain?
This topic interests me because when I was in middle school I read a book called Demian and that book kind of touched on the topics of religion, temptation, spirituality, but most importantly human psychology and what happens when you are easily influenced. The author of that book was a German-Swiss poet and novelist Hermann Hesse who talked a lot about psychology, specifically psychoanalysis. He was someone who was heavily influenced by Carl Jung who was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst so after finding that out I decided to read more about his work. I read a book that talked about his teachings called Map of the Soul. In that book I learned so much more about the human brain and what was built around it.
The main thing that stood out to me was a piece of your brain that is known to be shaped like an almond called the Amygdala. The Amygdala is this small but very effective part of your brain that is primarily associated with emotional processing. To understand this topic more I decided to read books where the term was used more naturally instead of scholarly and a good book I found was Almond by Sohn Won-Pyung. In this book the main character is a Korean boy who was born with an underdeveloped Amygdala leading him to have Alexithymia which is also called Emotional Blindness. This is a brain disorder in which a person can’t really identify or process both their own and others emotions in a normal way. In this story we see him go through all of these sorts of life events but while reading I mostly noticed how we never really got to see him genuinely fear something making me question fear itself and exactly how it is connected to the Amygdala whether it is good or bad. By the end of this bibliography I hope to learn how and why emotions like fear are connected to the Amygdala and how if your main fear receptors are affected or missing could that sensation be replaced and if so what would replace the feeling we all know as fear.
I love how you expressed your interests in the book you were reading in middle school and how much you learned about the human brain. Not only that but you also explained how Amygdala was what interested you the most because of fear having to do with Amygdala causing you to feel curious about how they are connected.