Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Case 2
A main source of driving accidents during the first years of driving is a
lack of risk sensitivity, not recognizing where the dangers are (the
other main source is a lack of driving skills).
3.4 WHERE IN THE BRAIN?
All input from our senses (seeing, hearing, touching) first stops in the thal-
amus (our central information room).
2
A main task of the thalamus is
scanning all input for possible danger. The external input passes through a
safety check before it is processed in other parts of the modern brain. The
amygdala, which produces the basic emotions (Murray, 2007), labels some
of the stimuli as potentially dangerous (LeDoux, 2002; Pessoa, 2008). This
is done with the help of the modern brain, which gives meaning to certain
stimuli, the programming as possibly dangerous (Pessoa, 2010). Next comes
the hippocampus, whose main task is to organize the process of storing
learned experiences. The brain has archives all over the cortex, but the labels
for risk sensitivity are stored right next to the hippocampus in an area that
is called the perirhinal cortex. As you can see on the illustration, these all
are positioned in the center of our brain. The perirhinal cortex is the store-
room of all sensory information related to objects and the potential conse-
quences that might be connected to these objects (Barbeaua, 2005; Devlin,
2007; Chaumon, 2009). Later, we will see that this information can be sent
for further processing via the cingulated gyrus to the prefrontal cortex.
2
The sense of smell is the only exception. The smell input from the nose first enters the emotional
brain before it is sent to the thalamus for integration with the input from the other senses. That
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the reason why smell has more capacity to evoke emotions like anxiety, aggression, attraction,
and so on. This topic will be addressed later.
