File:The path of fear.tif

English: Traumatic experiences leave deep traces in our brain forming a long lasting emotional memory stored in an intricate brain circuitry. During an aversive experience, sensory stimuli acquire a negative content through their association with a negative event. The Amygdala is a key region for this association and it is also involved in the autonomic behavior triggered by a traumatic situation: fear. Fear is a complex adaptive response elicited in the presence of possible dangers, as a consequence of a learned negative experience lived in the past. Here we show a 63X confocal image representing Fos-positive cells (green) in the rat secondary auditory cortex, activated by a tone predicted danger, co labeled with retrograde tracers arriving from the amygdale (red dots). This represents an unique example of a path involved in fear related responses dependent by an aversive memory encoded by neurons in a higher order cortex.