The purpose of the articles on this web page is to question where our sense of reality comes from. Is our sense of reality a rational deduction, or is it a "feeling"? That is to say, is our sense of reality a cognitive phenomenon, or is it an emotion?
The page entitled Distorted Reality is to demonstrate how "unreasonable" delusions can be "protected" by elaborate cognitive explanations for impossible events.
The article on the Triune Brain divides the brain into three evolutionary phases, like a three-layered onion. The middle region is responsible for emotionality and species-specific social behavior. The outer region, and last to evolve, mediates cognitive processes; processes such as reasoning, language, abstraction, mathematics, and the contemplation of the future. MacLean argues in this article that our sense of reality resides in the older, middle region, and not in our powers of reason. This would explain the report in the page from the first article on Distorted Reality. The latter part of the article on the Triune Brain is not needed for our discussion, and can be disregarded.
The article by LeDoux indicates that the part of the brain with learn to fear something is anatomically distinct from the area of the brain which learn to not longer be afraid of that stimulus. This would suggest that, once we become afraid of something, we never lose that fear, and one part of the brain, from there after, wants to respond to the stimulus with fear. We do not lose our sense of fear, rather, another part of the brain overrides that fear response. If this second area becomes functionally disconnected from the first brain area, we will always respond with fear.
Mike Davis's article on fear suggests that people suffering from PTSD cannot use cognitive information to modulate their fear response to a threatening stimulus. The respond with excessive fear, even when they "know" that the situation is save. This observation suggests that the area mediating fear, the Amygdala, is functionally disconnected from areas of the brain which are interpreting the "safe" signal. This is similar to what LeDoux found with his animals. In addition, the amygdala is in the middle region of the brain (the paleomammalian region) whereas, presumably, the area which is interpreting the safe signal is in the outer, newer region of the brain (the neomammalian region).
The last section is a primer on how drugs work.