Contracting a muscle is a movement. Freezing is a behavior because it involves multiple, coordinated muscle movements. The feeling of fear is an experience that may or may not occur together with behaviors like freezing. Circuitry that controls freezing is not circuitry for fear. This egregious scientific misunderstanding, along with the phrase “fear learning,” has sown confusion for decades and turned what’s effectively an experiment on classical conditioning into an industry of fear.46
