Brains, you see, vary a lot from person to person – they vary as much as faces do.
The amygdala is one of those brain structures that a lot of people know a little bit about, and there’s a definite tendency to conflate the amygdala and the fear response itself – as if the amygdala, and the amygdala alone, ’causes’ fear.
The idea of critical windows extends beyond just vision, of course: almost every system in the brain has a critical window when it needs to experience certain stimuli, or it won’t get wired up properly. The most obvious example is language: if you don’t learn a language early on, it’s nigh impossible to become truly fluent.
It’s often meaningless to talk about a genetic trait without also discussing the environment in which that trait appears. Sometimes, genes don’t work at all until the environment awakens them.
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