DOI: 10.1101/283820
Overview and take-home messages:
Masferrer et al. have made a significant advance to the field of the neurophysiology of fear by showing that some neurons in the periaqueductal grey and in the ventromedial hypothalamus respond to threat level, while other neurons are associated with motor responses. This contradicts the hierarchical model that suggests that more rostral regions are responsible for detecting threat and selecting responses, while more caudal regions execute motor responses. In addition, they have bridged a gap in our knowledge of how neurons in those regions code fear independently, as a distributed network. Although this work is of significant interest to the field, there are some concerns that could be addressed in the next version. These are outlined below.