Yes, the panic attack thing is pretty real. Know someone that had a severe allergic reaction, basically started choking to death, paramedics involved, all that. The experience imprinted itself deeply, such that she's deathly afraid of it happening again, and gets triggered with panic attacks. She's like two years on from the experience and through a lot of work she's much better, but it's pretty crazy how broadly it has impacted her life as an anxiety disorder. She knows it's not logical, but describes it as a fear of death and of a spiraling nature such that if she can't arrest it in the moment it compounds very badly, which reinforces the phenomenon - panicking about panicking. Anxiety over a panic reaction. So to be clear, it's not an allergic reaction she's experiencing but trauma from one in the past.
When I told my doctor about my oldest having a reaction to a chocolate bar with peanuts, one of his first questions was "did he react before he knew it had peanuts?"
He's pretty anxious about food in general, so it actually made a lot of sense.
It's not logically thought out, emotion is a parallel decision making process to logical thought. It may be that in some circumstances, fear is a logical outcome of a stimulus, but that's not the same thing.
Second having brain damage and being incapable of processing emotion, doesn't mean that the rest of the brain hasn't been affected. In other words, a brain with an inability to process emotion, may also have an inability to process logical thought outcomes unrelated to the loss of emotional processing.
But look... the brain is complex. It's not some sort of pre-planned construct, as I'm sure you know it's an evolved organ, layered, complex. For example, memory imprint seems to be heavily impacted by emotion. Note that I'm not saying "only formed by", but impacted.
It's why you get PTSD, and it makes sense. Think mouse set upon by cat, the mouse naturally was exceptionally fearful, panicking, adrenaline, and it's very important that the mouse associates any reference to 'cat' with 'fear' and 'apprehension'. So the concept that emotion can fix survival important memories into memory, is seemingly a sensible one.
Yet for all of this, we can lay down knowledge and retain it without a cat standing over our shoulder. Realistically, we have multiple decision making processes, and ways to store memory, and so on, running in parallel.
Parallel also doesn't mean, by the way, that one cannot be affected by the other. You can use one decision making process to affect another. You can quell emotional response with reason, and emotional response can quell logical thought. Again, complex.
Effectively, what I'm saying here is that this is a complex topic. And that I'm sticking with my rendition, whilst explaining that 'parallel' doesn't imply 'isolated'.
By the way, fun 30 minute dive into that book/author/articles, thanks for the link.
To me it seems like if they logically know the smell can not cause harm having a strong emotional fear reaction is illogical. Of course most emotions are so that's not meant to be a blame or anything...
Because it means you're in the immediate vicinity of a thing that can kill you and has nearly killed you before?
Is it fair to call it "illogical" to panic when someone puts a bag over your head when you were previously kidnapped and almost murdered after someone put a bag over your head?
To add some clarification - the event has caused general anxiety and risk of panic attacks, such that even driving down streets or flying on planes as she's done a thousand times before starts filling her with anxiety and panic. It's the panicking about panicking which has expanded the scope beyond just being in the identical scenario as before. That's the part that she recognizes as illogical - driving down the street shouldn't cause anxiety, as she's done it without incident many times before. There are no new identifiable dangers or risks. But it's a combination of intrusive thoughts, physical reactions, all that, which can spiral. Being on the outside it's very hard for me to comprehend, but there's a sense of no control over the chain reaction. There are techniques she has adopted, like using the DARE app regularly and other therapy techniques which have helped unwind this, but it takes a long time. Time is a damn good healer though.
