Trump exploits and benefits from fear, our most powerful emotion

Volumes will be written about how Donald Trump sits in the White House despite low poll numbers, and a historically low popular vote.

One element of power, examined from Machiavelli on down, is the exploitation of fear, or the acquiescence to it. Trump is the new Teflon president, fast outpacing Ronald Reagan. The more he is critiqued for obvious lies, the more support he gains, irregardless of public polls. He sits in the White House despite losing the popular vote in historic proportions.

In our book, Healing the Brain, we look at fear, the most powerful emotion of all mammals. It can be said that Trump took the low road to the White House.

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, in his landmark book The Emotional Brain, looks closely at the irrational mechanisms of the fear response:

Years of research by many workers have given us extensive knowledge of the neural pathways involved in processing acoustic information, which is an excellent starting point for examining the neurological foundations of fear. The natural flow of auditory information—the way you hear music, speech, or anything else—is that the sound comes into the ear, enters the brain, goes up to a region called the auditory midbrain, then to the auditory thalamus, and ultimately to the auditory cortex. Thus, in the auditory pathway, as in other sensory systems, the cortex is the highest level of processing.

So the first question we asked when we began these studies of the fear system was: Does the sound have to go all the way to the auditory cortex in order for the rat to learn that the sound paired with the shock is dangerous? When we made lesions in the auditory cortex, we found that the animal could still make the association between the sound and the shock, and would still react with fear behavior to the sound alone. Since information from all our senses is processed in the cortex—which ultimately allows us to become conscious of seeing the predator or hearing the sound—the fact that the cortex didn’t seem to be necessary to fear conditioning was both intriguing and mystifying. We wanted to understand how something as important as the emotion of fear could be mediated by the brain if it wasn’t going into the cortex, where all the higher processes occur.

Some other area or areas of the brain must receive information from the thalamus and establish memories about experiences that stimulate a fear response.

So we next made lesions in the auditory thalamus and then in the auditory midbrain. The midbrain supplies the major sensory input to the thalamus, which in turn supplies the major sensory input to the cortex. What we found was that lesions in either of these subcortical areas completely eliminated the rat’s susceptibility to fear conditioning. If the lesions were made in an unconditioned rat, the animal could not learn to make the association between sound and shock, and if the lesions were made on a rat that had already been conditioned to fear the sound, it would no longer react to the sound. But if the stimulus didn’t have to reach the cortex, where was it going from the thalamus?

Some other area or areas of the brain must receive information from the thalamus and establish memories about experiences that stimulate a fear response. To find out, we made a tracer injection in the auditory thalamus (the part of the thalamus that processes sounds) and found that some cells in this structure projected axons into the amygdala. This is key, because the amygdala has for many years been known to be important in emotional responses. So it appeared that information went to the amygdala from the thalamus without going to the neocortex. We then did experiments with rats that had amygdala lesions, measuring freezing and blood pressure responses elicited by the sound after conditioning. We found that the amygdala lesion prevented conditioning from taking place. In fact, the responses are very similar to those of unconditioned animals that hear the sound for the first time, without getting the shock. So the amygdala is critical to this pathway.

It receives information about the outside world directly from the thalamus, and immediately sets in motion a variety of bodily responses. We call this thalamo-amygdala pathway the low road because it’s not taking advantage of all of the higher-level information processing that occurs in the neocortex, which also communicates with the amygdala.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE BRAIN AND FEAR IN OUR NEW BOOK

Trump, Putin and Lies

This election was a terrifying nightmare. Partisanship abounded and tonight news from the Washington Post describes how the Russian were involved in our election and how Republicans voted to squelch a CIA investigation. Read about our brains and behavior in Healing the Brain, our new book.

In the excerpt from the Dana Foundation, below, Dr. Guy McKhann writes about lies and liars.

This is a column from Dana's print publication, Brain in the News
Those of us with children and grandchildren try to raise them with a regard for the truth. We preach that lying is unacceptable behavior. On the other hand, we may “stretch the truth” every so often: making results sound more positive, leaving out criticisms, not fully acknowledging the work of others, saying things about our research when trying to raise money that we would never say at a scientific meeting. This list could go on and on. After all, we just went through an election in which the majority of our population considered both major candidates “untrustworthy.”

Aside from a Pinocchio-like creation, the two major methods for detecting lies are polygraph and brain imaging. Polygraph machines have been around for more than 50 years. They measure physiological functions such as heart rate, respiration, and skin resistance. Accuracy varies from study to study, but the figure of 75 percent accuracy is commonly used.

The alternative is brain imaging, particularly fMRI. The idea behind this approach is that when a person is lying, or maintaining a lie, parts of the brain have to work harder. When they do, this increase in activity is represented as increased blood flow to specific brain areas. The areas are somewhat widespread and include prefrontal areas and the limbic system. However, these areas are activated in many other situations. At present there are no specific truth or lying “centers” in the brain.

A group at Penn, led by Daniel Langleben, is one of the first to make direct comparisons of the two techniques. Subjects were asked to choose a number between three and eight and reply “no” when asked about the different numbers, making one answer a lie. The fMRI was 24 percent more accurate than polygraph in detecting the lie, though neither method was perfect.

In the real world, of course, there are situations in which parts of a statement may be true and other parts false. Despite the claims of companies trying to advance commercial products for use in court, brain scans are not yet ready for prime time.

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Trump's low road to the White House

The human brain has developed over millenia. Like a non-stop power plant, the brain added new structures to basic ones (controlling basic functions like breathing). The crowning achievement is the cortex, the largest brain structure, where higher thought and reasoning take place.

Scientists have learned that sensory input, e.g., sounds, do not have to travel to the cortex to induce fear. Impulses need only travel to a primitive brain structure called the amygdala. 

When FDR delivered his first inaugural address, he appealed to reasoning, though his topic was the fear of a nation shattered by the Great Depression. Like dictators and demagogues through history, Donald Trump goes straight for the lower brain with pointed, uncomplicated messages that require little thought. For example, his nicknamesl for nearly all of his opponents (Low Energy Jeb, Little Marco, Crooked Hillary) make for instant recognition and easy identification--and great ratings for cash-starved cable media. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Trump echoes right wing talk radio hosts, who offer short, immediate solutions that fit neatly into a brief format. No exhausting engagement of the thinking brain required. Fear is our most powerful emotion and when Donald Trump boasted he knew how to win this election, like ad men from Madison Avenue, he knew what worked: the low road to the White House. Hillary Clinton and the Democrats had a long, arduous path to the thinking brain to overcome the power of fear and other powerful emotions.

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Trump Trauma

A blog called Trump Trauma invites people to share their feelings about the candidate:

RACIST COMMENTS

“…laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”

~Trumped! 1991

Traumatizing Students

“My students are terrified of Donald Trump,” reports a teacher from a middle school with a large African-American Muslim population. “They think that if he’s elected, all black people will get sent back to Africa.”

Southern Poverty Law Center Report, 2016

"Lie of the Year"

“The Obama-Clinton war on coal has cost Michigan over 50,000 jobs.” (Fact: Total people working in ANY kind of mining in Michigan is less than 7,000, and less than 20,000 in electricity production.)

~Politifact Lie Of The Year, 2016

LEARN ABOUT STRESS AND YOUR HEALTH. CLICK HERE. 

 

Emergency post: Stop the terror of Trump (and Fallon's a nimrod)

I write this blog to talk about stress and promote my new book, Healing the Brain: Stress, Trauma and LGBTQ Youth.

Now I'm using whatever voice I have to wake people up to the threat of a Trump Presidency.

As a gay man, I've had to accommodate a lot. I have had to bow down to white straight male privilege. I've learned to be silent. To temper my comments. To miss the "soft" bigotry (and not-so "soft bigotry) of people like Trump. To be deceived by his, as has been called in the media, bullshit.

Now to anyone "on the fence" about voting for Hillary: Have you lost your minds? You should be embarrassed.

And I'm completely sick of the Dr. Oz, Jimmy Fallons, and Matt Lauers, the incompetent media people who have given Trump a pass on his racism, white supremecism, misogeny, lies and fraud. Shame on the media, shame on us for tolerating them.

So please wake up. And learn about stress and trauma such as induced by Trump by reading my book.

CLICK HERE ON ON PICTURE

Trump anxiety, stress

The Washington Post writes,

To the catalogue of anxieties her patients explore during therapy — marriage, children and careers — psychologist Alison Howard is now listening to a new source of stress: the political rise of Donald Trump.

(Steve Brodner for The Washington Post)

In recent days, at least two patients have invoked the Republican front-runner, including one who talked at length about being disturbed that Trump can be so divisive and popular at the same time, said Howard, who practices in the District.

What had happened to Trump during his childhood, the patient wanted to know, to make him such a “bad person”?

 

“He has stirred people up,” Howard said. “We’ve been told our whole lives not to say bad things about people, to not be bullies, to not ostracize people based on their skin color. We have these social mores, and he breaks all of them and he’s successful. And people are wondering how he gets away with it.”

Hand-wringing over Trump’s rapid climb, once confined to Washington’s political establishment, is now palpable among everyday Americans who are growing ever more anxious over the prospect of the billionaire reaching the White House.

With each Trump victory in the GOP primaries and caucuses, Democrats and Republicans alike are sharing their alarm with friends over dinner, with strangers over social media and, in some cases, with their therapists. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that 69 percent of Americans said the idea of “President Trump” made them anxious.

For some, Trump’s diatribes against undocumented immigrants, Mexicans and Muslims evoke unpleasant flashbacks of dictators. For others, his raw-toned insults conjure memories of high school bullies.

“It’s like a hurricane is coming at us, and I don’t have any way of knowing which way to go or how to combat it,” Taylor, 27, a Democrat, said in a phone interview. “He’s extremely reactionary, and that’s what scares me the most. I feel totally powerless, and it’s horrible.”

Learn more about the stress response: