Consciousness and the Fearful Face

 

Seems that we know a fearful face even if we are not consciously aware. Indeed, your brain can detect and rapidly detect fearful facial fearful facial expression that are otherwise invisible to the eye. The sensory data is not sufficient to trigger consciousness of the face or the expression on it but is sufficient to trigger the emotion of fear.

The brains' amygdala is a small, almond-shaped structure deep in the brain which processes both positive and negative emotions. Brain scanning studies show that the amygdala is activated in response to fearful faces, even when the faces are not consciously perceived.

 

A study was conducted to expose experimental subjects briefly flash faces which were rendered invisible by a process called backward masking n which each image is shown briefly, and then quickly followed by another image of the same color that does not contain a face.  Images of fearful faces, but not of happy or neutral ones, evoked rapid cellular responses in the amygdala, but not in the visual cortex or other regions of the brain. Yet they had no conscious awareness of the faces at all.

So what does this mean? It appear that a fast neural pathway for detection of fear which operates automatically and outside of conscious awareness and without inputs from the cerebral cortex associated with consciousness.

But then we already knew that the brain functions unconsciously some 90% of the time. This is an experiment proof that it can and does.