We next asked whether safety training gives rise to a true sense of safety, an actual sense of self-confidence, or whether it simply lowers the baseline of fear that is always present in all of us. To distinguish between the two possibilities, we recorded from the striatum, an area of the brain normally involved in positive reinforcement and in feeling good. (This is the area activated by cocaine and other addictive drugs, which hijack the positive reinforcing neural system and entice a person to use the drug more often.) We found that neural activity in the striatum following a tone is not
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