Effects of Sudden Fear
Review of medical literature on the effects of sudden fear or attack on the human mind and body. Does it support M. Tony Blauer’s concepts.
Dr
Eric Levasseur, MD, CMFC, PDR Team member.
Abstract:
This review was done by myself has a physician responsible for the education of
health care workers in northern New Brunswick concerning the management of
aggression by patients and PDR team member to see if the medical literature is
in tune with Mr. Blauer’s extensive research and experience. I searched
Medline and Psyclnfo plus the extensive Canadian Library of Family Medicine. I
had a bit of trouble finding article that didn’t emphasize animal studies but
found some that where very interesting. I took all the articles from 1993 and up
in consideration and found 26 that were related in some way to the human mind
and body’s response too sudden fear and or attack. None where specific to
self-defense. All the articles I found supported M Blauer`s concepts and ideas
about the important physiological changes that happens during these rare
moments. They also clearly supported the idea that during sudden fear or attack
the cognitive brain is bypassed and the stimuli elicits automatic visceral and
skeletal movements characterized by rather invariant topographical features of
fight or flight (the flinch).
Each individual is a complex supersystem, consisting of numerous interacting modular systems. The emotions, perception, cognition and action are processes or products of these complex systems. Current evidence suggests that emotions in this case; fear is composed of dissociable modules witches are 1) Neurohormonal processes, 2) Expressive behavior or neuromuscular activities and 3) Conscious Aspect or feeling state.
Here
is a brief summary of the neurohormonal(1) components as many scientists
theorize about today. The brain-stem central gray, thalamus, amygdala,
hypothalamus, locus coeruleus, habenula, perirhinal cortex and neocortex are all
involved. The amygdala seems to play a major role in processing stimulus
information and activate an emotional or physical response without involving the
neocortex and the cognitive functions subserved by it.
The brain-stem gray seems to control some fear-elicited motor response
such as freezing. I’ve but gave you a brief overview of this complex system
but the interesting thing about it are that we find that the root of the system
is in phylogenetically old structures. This is consistent with the notions that
they are a fundamental part of our evolutionary heritage and have inherently
adaptive and survival functions. This completely supports the idea of a
“Genetically inspired/Intuitively engineered” self-defense system.
The second module witch is the neuromuscular and sensory feedback component is also complex. This second component refers to central efferent commands and gross striated muscle activity generated by the neural evaluation processes. They include observable patterned gross body movements like facial expression, head-eye movements, posture, arm
movements,
vocal expressions and muscle action potential. The central nervous system is
implicated at this phase and the patterns can be somewhat modified but only by
repeated exposure to high fear or high emotional situation. For example an
electric shock is given and for the majority of men they will instinctively
extend their arms if given a choice between extension and flexion. If every time
they extend their arms they get another shock and when they flex them they
don’t they will eventually flex them. For
the purpose of this article I will only talk about arm movements for the second
module. The
Only
in the third module does the conscious aspect come into play. Here again we have
multiple components witches are: motivation, action readiness, action tendency,
biasing of perception, cues for cognition and action and the feeling state. Here
again much of these are covered in M. Blauer`s system. The fear feeling in
evolutionary perspective motivates self-protecting behaviors. The potency of the
fear feeling dominates all functional systems. It tends to eliminate all parts
of the perceptual fields that don’t serve the fight or flight response; it
generates cognitive bias and reduces working memory. If we want fear feelings to
have an adaptive effect we need to have appropriate connection lines among
emotions, cognition and action system. This is well covered in M. Blauer’s
system of self-defense.
My
review of the medical literature showed that while the studies where not done
for self-defense in particular but rather to look at the effects of sudden fear
or aversive stimuli on the human mind and body they found concepts that are
described in M. Blauer`s system. It seems his concepts are reproducible in
different discipline and are universally valid.
References
1)
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