This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedant.
In the 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz, one of the central characters is the cowardly lion.
He cuts a figure that is recognizable to us all.
He longs to be brave, but when his courage is tested, he shrinks in fear.
Look at that!
Look at that!
I want to go home!
The cowardly lion eventually discovers his true nature.
When he is given a medal to honor his courage,
it helps him see that he is in fact a lion, that he was brave all along.
The moral of the story is clear.
The lion always had the capacity to be brave.
He just didn't know it.
The Wizard of Oz is a work of fiction,
but every day we see the cowardly lion's dilemma entails from real life.
situations where people are called upon to be brave.
Sometimes they rise to the occasion, but many fail to do so, often with disastrous consequences.
Fear, of course, is not always a bad thing.
Evolutionary biologists find that circuits in the brain that govern the fear response are ancient,