Republic War: Professor Jeffrey Sachs Gives His Prediction of The Future of the West: Be prepared to deal with the concept of “Delusional” and form your own view.

Posted on March 26, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
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very well mind: The Four Fear Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn

Posted on March 26, 2026 by michelleclarke2015

The Four Fear Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn

By 

Amy Marschall, PsyD 

Updated on March 05, 2026

 Reviewed by 

David Susman, PhD

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Key Takeaways

  • Fear responses happen automatically and are designed to keep us safe.
  • There are four types of fear responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.
  • Mindfulness can help us notice when we’re having a fear response and make a different choice.

The emotion of fear is a core part of the human experience. Our brains are wired to experience fear as a way to warn us that we might be in danger, such as when faced with a bear in the woods. But what happens when we feel afraid?

Discover how this emotion impacts the brain and the responses this can create, namely fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Continue reading to also learn whether we can change our fear responses when faced with scary situations.

Fear and the Brain

Fear starts in the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes emotions. When the amygdala detects potential danger, it triggers a fear response. This happens when:1

  • We face real danger
  • We think we are in danger
  • We encounter “scary” stimuli, such as a horror movie
  • The amygdala is artificially stimulated

The amygdala handles emotional responses, while the frontal lobe and prefrontal cortex manage language and impulse control. During fear, energy shifts to the amygdala, slowing other brain functions. This is why it’s hard to speak or think clearly when afraid.2

Although some form of damage to the brain can impair fear responses,3 most people feel afraid sometimes.

Fear Responses

When we feel fear and the amygdala is activated, our brain quickly decides how to respond. The goal is to keep us safe by choosing an option to avoid danger with minimal harm. These responses are categorized into four types: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.

Fight

As Rajneesh said, “anger is fear in disguise,” which neatly captures the fight response. When the brain detects danger, it may choose to confront the threat. This can result in physical or verbal confrontations, often accompanied by strong anger.

In a fight response, our brain seeks to neutralize danger by overcoming it. This approach can be effective if the danger is real and can be managed through strength. However, if the perceived threat isn’t actual, this response may lead to problems.

Flight

If our brain does not feel that it can successfully fight off danger, it may decide to try and escape, triggering a flight response. Essentially, this fear response involves trying to get as far away from the dangerous situation as quickly as possible. If the danger is something that can be outrun, the flight response can be effective.

Freeze

Another fear response is to freeze or to try to be very still and quiet until the danger passes. Some people with social anxiety disorder experience selective mutism,4 where they find themselves unable to speak in anxiety-provoking situations. Their vocal cords become paralyzed due to fear, and they are unable to speak until the anxiety passes. This is an example of the freeze response at work.

Evolutionary theories suggest that the freeze response might be the brain’s attempt to avoid detection by predators by essentially holding very still until the threat goes away. The fear response shuts down the body’s ability to move, causing the person to literally feel frozen or stuck until the fear passes.5

Fawn

“Fawning” is a fear response where the brain tries to appease the source of fear to prevent harm. Trauma survivors often use this people-pleasing approach to avoid abuse by keeping the abuser content.6 It can also manifest as compliance to avoid harm.

When someone complies with an aggressor to reduce the risk of harm, they aren’t consenting to abuse. Their brain is attempting to ensure safety in a challenging situation.

Can You Change Your Fear Response?

Because the four fear responses are chosen so quickly, we are typically not actively deciding which is most effective or appropriate in a given situation. These processes happen automatically because when we are in danger, there is often no time to sit and weigh our options. Our brain simply does its best in the moment.

Unfortunately, this means we may not make the most effective decision when the amygdala is activated. For example, a person might lash out at their spouse due to a fight response when feeling anxious about work. Or they may freeze and be unable to deliver an important presentation.

When someone has a history of trauma, their brain might become more likely to activate fear responses.7

Mindfulness of our emotions can help us notice when we are having a fear response and enable us to try to reactivate the logical part of our brain. When we notice that we are experiencing this response, we can try and make a different choice. Research shows we can train ourselves to respond differently to fear.8

When Fear Responses May Be an Issue

Because fear is one way our brain keeps us safe, it would not be healthy to never experience a fear response. For example, early humans who did not experience fear probably tried to pet the saber tooth tiger instead of hiding, a choice that probably did not end well for them.

We want our brains to accurately perceive whether or not something is a threat and make the best choice to keep us safe. But if you find that you avoid situations that are not actually dangerous (such as social situations), get into frequent arguments, or put others’ wants and needs ahead of your own to your detriment due to fear, there may be something else going on.

Frequent, intense fear responses when there is not an actual threat can be a sign of anxiety, for instance.9 With anxiety, fear responses can occur when there is no danger or may be more intense than the situation requires. Fortunately, anxiety can be effectively treated through therapy and medication.10

Read more:

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By Amy Marschall, PsyD
Dr. Amy Marschall is an autistic clinical psychologist with ADHD, working with children and adolescents who also identify with these neurotypes among others. She is certified in TF-CBT and telemental health.

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The brain’s ability to grasp the “gist” of a visual scene begins earlier than expected

Posted on March 26, 2026 by michelleclarke2015

News Release 25-Mar-2026

The brain’s ability to grasp the “gist” of a visual scene begins earlier than expected

Researchers show that primary visual cortex encodes motion summaries and variability before higher brain regions transform them into category signals Peer-Reviewed Publication

Institute for Basic Science

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Figure 1
image: This study shows that mouse V1 simultaneously encodes the ensemble mean and variance of motion, providing a robust summary‐statistic representation that persists despite single-neuron variability. These signals propagate to PPC, where they are transformed into abstract category representations during decision making. The findings reveal a hierarchical compression of sensory detail into increasingly abstract statistical codes.view more Credit: Institute for Basic Science

When animals move through complex visual environments, the brain cannot afford to analyze every detail one by one. Instead, it rapidly extracts the overall structure of the scene—for example, the mean (average) direction of motion across many moving elements. This ability, known as ensemble perception, allows the brain to capture the “gist” of a scene at a glance. Yet where, and how, this statistical summary is computed in the brain has remained unclear.

A research team led by LEE Doyun and KIM Yee-Joon at the Center for Memory and Glioscience within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) has now shown that this process begins much earlier in the visual system than previously thought.

Co-corresponding author LEE Doyun said, “What is especially striking is that this transformation begins already in primary visual cortex. The brain starts compressing complex sensory input into useful statistical summaries at a very early stage.”

In the brain, visual information is processed step by step along a hierarchy of regions. The primary visual cortex (V1) is the first cortical stage that receives visual input from the eyes and is traditionally thought to process simple features such as edges or motion direction. Further downstream, the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) integrates this information into more abstract representations that are linked to perception and decision-making.

The researchers found that V1 already encodes not only the mean direction of complex motion patterns, but also their variance—how dispersed or uncertain the motion is. This information is then carried forward to PPC, where it is reorganized into more abstract category representations that can guide behavior.

To investigate how the brain extracts these visual summaries, the team trained head-fixed mice to classify random-dot motion stimuli according to their overall direction. Unlike conventional motion displays, in which many dots move coherently in a single direction, the stimuli in this study were designed so that each dot moved in a different direction sampled from a controlled distribution. This allowed the researchers to independently manipulate the mean motion direction and its variability.

The mice successfully learned to group eight possible mean motion directions into two motion categories. Even when the motion of individual dots varied widely, the animals could still categorize the overall direction, indicating that they were not simply following a few prominent local signals. Instead, they were extracting a true statistical summary of the scene.

“We showed that the brain does not process complex visual input by tracking each element individually,” said LEE Young-Beom, first author of the study. “Instead, it extracts stable summary information such as mean and variance to rapidly capture the overall structure of the environment.”

Using miniscope calcium imaging, the researchers recorded neural activity in both V1 and PPC while the mice performed the task or passively viewed the stimuli. At the level of individual neurons, only a relatively small subset showed clear selectivity for the global mean motion direction. At the population level, however, neural activity in both regions robustly encoded the mean motion direction—even though most single neurons did not appear strongly tuned on their own.

The study revealed a clear division of labor across the cortical hierarchy. In V1, population activity encoded both the mean and the variance of motion direction, indicating that early visual cortex already computes summary statistics rather than merely relaying local signals. In PPC, by contrast, the representation shifted toward more abstract, task-relevant category information, suggesting that sensory summaries are progressively transformed into task-relevant signals.

The researchers also found that task demands could reshape early visual representations. During active categorization, the neural representation of mean motion direction in V1 became systematically biased toward the center of the learned category. This suggests that even early visual cortex is not purely stimulus-driven, but can be influenced by learning and behavioral context.

Another notable finding was that seemingly “untuned” neurons still contributed substantially to the population code. Even neurons that did not meet conventional selectivity criteria helped support accurate representation of global motion direction when analyzed collectively, highlighting the importance of distributed population coding in the brain.

Co-corresponding author KIM Yee-Joon added, “Our findings suggest that visual information is progressively reorganized—from summary statistics in early visual cortex to more abstract category representations in higher cortical areas. This provides an important clue to how the brain efficiently makes sense of complex scenes.”

By revealing how the brain converts noisy sensory input into stable statistical summaries and then into abstract category signals, the study provides new insight into a fundamental principle of perception. The findings may help explain how the brain rapidly extracts meaningful structure from complex environments and could also inform future work in artificial intelligence and computer vision.

The study was published online in Advanced Science on March 23, 2026.

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El PAIS: Euthanasia … the rock face called reality. Noelia Castillo, a young woman and her choice of right to die.

Posted on March 26, 2026 by michelleclarke2015


Noelia Castillo, the young woman who fought her parents for her right to die: ‘I can’t take this family anymore’

After a 601-day delay from the original date caused by her father’s legal challenges, this 25-year-old from Barcelona who is a paraplegic and lives in constant pain, is scheduled to receive euthanasia at 6 pm on Thursday

The residence where Noelia Castillo is set to receive her euthanasia after a long legal battle.GIANLUCA BATTISTA
Jesús García Bueno

Jesús García Bueno

Barcelona – MAR 26, 2026 – 16:38 CET

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A Barcelona judge on Thursday denied a last-minute request for emergency injunctive measures to halt the euthanasia of Noelia Castillo Ramos, a 25-year-old Spanish woman who is scheduled to receive assisted death at 6 p.m. local time. The measures had been requested by Abogados Cristianos (Christian Lawyers), the law firm representing the father. For a year and a half this organization has been behind the father’s legal battle to prevent the assisted death of Noelia, who suffers from paraplegia.

If everything had gone according to plan, Noelia would have passed away on August 2, 2024. That was the date her euthanasia had initially been scheduled for. A month earlier, the young woman from Barcelona had received unanimous approval from the public agency responsible for ensuring that assisted dying is carried out correctly in the northeastern region of Catalonia.

Everything was ready. But then an order to stop came through: a Barcelona court had accepted a petition from her father, Gerónimo Castillo, to temporarily halt the euthanasia. Advised by the ultra-Catholic group Abogados Cristianos, the man has entangled his daughter in a legal maze that has kept her alive, against her will, for 601 days.

Her case has been unlike any other: it has exposed the flaws and weaknesses of the euthanasia law; it has sparked debate over who has the right to try to prevent an adult from carrying out their decision to die with dignity; and it has prolonged the suffering of a young woman who has never wavered in her decision and who has received scientific endorsement from the independent professionals who make up the Catalan Guarantee and Evaluation Commission (CGAC).

The ordeal has taken its toll on Noelia, who decided to say goodbye by speaking at length in an interview on the television channel Antena 3, which aired the conversation from her maternal grandmother’s home this Wednesday, the day before her scheduled death. “Let’s see if I can get some rest because I can’t take this family anymore, I can’t take the pain anymore, I can’t take everything that torments me in my head from what I’ve been through,” she says.

Her father, mother, and sister all oppose the euthanasia, she said. The first time she mentioned her plans at home, her father yelled at her, she said. “He told me I had no heart, that I didn’t think of others, that everything I said was a lie. It hurt me,” she said, before pointing out the contradiction between her father’s desire to keep her alive and his neglect. “He never calls me or writes to me. Why does he want me alive, just to keep me in a hospital?” In the interview, she is seen talking with her mother, Yoli Ramos, about her decision. “Not all parents are prepared for this. He keeps telling me he understands me, but he doesn’t.”

Her life has not been easy: her parents’ neglect — they separated when she was 13 — led to her being placed in the care of the Catalan government for a time. Later, she said, she suffered various incidents of sexual abuse and assault. The last time, she said, it was at the hands of three boys. Shortly thereafter, in October 2022, she threw herself from the fifth floor of a building. It was then that she became paraplegic and requested euthanasia, a petition that was approved in July 2024 after the Catalan government’s agency determined that she was in an “irreversible” clinical condition causing her “severe dependency, chronic pain, and debilitating suffering.” She met the requirements set by law.

But nothing went as planned, and Noelia had to wait for rulings from as many as five different courts before seeing her right upheld. Her case was the first in Spain to go to trial.

Barring any more unforeseen circumstances, there will be no more delays. On March 26, 2026 — as she herself has announced — Noelia’s life will come to an end at the age of 25.

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GZERO: How AI is being used in the Iran war

Posted on March 26, 2026 by michelleclarke2015

Analysis

How AI is being used in the Iran war

​Smoke rises following an explosion, after Israel and the U.S. launched strikes on Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 3, 2026.

Smoke rises following an explosion, after Israel and the U.S. launched strikes on Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 3, 2026. 

Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

By Riley CallananMarch 26, 2026

Syria was the first social media war, where the Syrian government harnessed the power of social media to spread misinformation. Ukraine was the first drone war, taking combat beyond the trenches. Now, the Iran conflict is the first artificial intelligence war, as the world’s strongest military embraces the technology.

Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of US Central Command, said earlier this month the Pentagon was “leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools” to sift through “vast amounts of data in seconds” and make “smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react.” Here’s how AI is being used in the conflict so far.

Targeting. The US military has been preparing to use AI for years. In 2017, the Pentagon launched Project Maven, an initiative to use computers to sort through swaths of video footage and other data. Palantir took the lead on the project. Creating Maven Smart System, a $1.3 billion piece of software that combines battlefield data, intelligence reports, and surveillance footage on a map, and uses AI to detect targets. The system is integrated with Anthropic’s Claude large language model (LLM), which processes the data and turns it into actions, recommending what should be hit and with what weapon, in real time.

A human still makes the final decision, but the model drastically speeds up the “kill chain,” or the process of identifying, prioritizing, and eviscerating the target. Reporting suggests Maven helped the US strike more than 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of the campaign.

Bureaucracy. “When people think about the military using AI they picture Iron Man and autonomous weapons,” says Eurasia Group Geotechnology expert Scott Bade,, “But that’s not really the way AI is being used.” Instead, much of AI’s impact is much more mundane. According to Bade most of the military’s AI integration is bureaucratic and operational. “The Pentagon is a giant office building,” meaning that AI is largely being used for predictive maintenance, logistics, and moving supplies more efficiently.

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Intelligence. But AI is also transforming military intelligence. Some military officials claim they have produced intelligence reports that “no human hands” have touched, as AI sifts through vast transcripts far faster than any human can and quickly draws insights. “There used to be data that the military had but couldn’t use because it didn’t have the capacity to analyze it,” says Bade.

But an AI’s outputs are only as good as its inputs. LLMs, in particular, can produce recommendations without clear explanations, which can make it difficult for military personnel to assess their accuracy.

The concerns. The use of AI is raising concerns about the future of combat. This was shown in Israel’s use of AI-assisted targeting in Gaza after Oct. 7, where the accusation was not that a machine was independently choosing who lived or died, but that operators had become too comfortable with its recommendations. “They just accepted what the machine recommended pretty uncritically,” Bade said, “The IDF did some tests and decided they were confident with the margin of error.” The fear is not that killer robots could take over the military, but of automation bias: the tendency to trust a fast, confident system more than a slow, skeptical human.

AI is becoming a focal point when things go wrong, even when there isn’t evidence that it was used. On the first day of the US-Iran war, a Tomahawk cruise missile hit an elementary school in Minab, southern Iran. At least 168 people were killed, many of them children. Reports showed the US military had thought it was hitting a nearby Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base.

Further investigations found that outdated intelligence was likely to blame for the mistaken targeting. Nevertheless, in the days that followed, a group of Democrats in Congress called for an investigation into whether Maven was used and for oversight over AI’s use on the battlefield. “I think a lot of people have been quick to jump to blaming AI,” said Bade, when human error is to blame.

“Supply chain risk.” While the US uses AI in the Iran conflict, it is also in an active feud with one company behind the technology. Earlier this month, the Pentagon took the rare step of designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk” – effectively blacklisting it – for guardrails on its technology. The designation means that federal agencies – and anyone who wants to do business with the US military – must stop using software from the company. Anthropic is suing in response, alleging that the designation is punitive and constitutes a breach of contract.

Regardless of how the lawsuit pans out, the bigger question may be whether the Pentagon can disentangle the technology from its systems in the middle of an active conflict. In July 2025, the government signed a $200 million contract to embed Anthropic into its workflows. Military contractors have said it would take months to extract Claude from its processes, and that it would not be “quick nor painless.” It powers software like Project Maven, which has been incorporated across all branches of the military, making it inextricable – especially in the middle of the war.

It is unprecedented for the government to pick a fight with such an embedded part of its defense ecosystem in the middle of a war. And that may be the clearest sign yet of how important AI has become to modern warfare. It’s no longer the stuff of distant science fiction, but part of the machinery of war itself.

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Gas Oil … the world depends! Chaos at a local level is happening. Being aware is essential especially when we have wars with countries that are the major source of these vital products

Posted on March 26, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
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As an elder lemon now; having a lot of illness over decades and knowing how hard it is to get care or homehelp, if this real, let’s welcome this into our homes, hospitals and care facilities for a start

Posted on March 26, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
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Larry Fink CEO BlackRock “listen to what the man says”. BlackRock have offices in Dublin but overall manage 11 trillion US dollars.

Posted on March 26, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
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President Trump mentions Ireland … missile went 2,500 miles … basically how would Nato react?

Posted on March 26, 2026 by michelleclarke2015

Easier to understand

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Macho Manosphere Tate … be worried

Posted on March 26, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
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