There’s a general fun fact here, biological systems love double/multiple suppression circuits. In your example:
The emotion of “fear” suppresses the behaviour of “taking a scary path”
Emotional suppression suppresses the “fear”
Similarly, lots of biochemical pathways look something like:
Ambidextrase C suppresses promeloid protein LLB
Mothin 2b suppresses Ambidextrase C, allowing promeloid protein LLB to be synthesized
Or, to give a real example:
The Lac operon in bacteria controls a bunch of proteins for taking up and processing lactose. By default, these proteins are produced.
One of the produced proteins is actually an inhibitor, which turns off all the Lac-controlled proteins (including itself) maintaining them at a low level
If lactose is present, the (small amounts of) lactose uptake protein let it into the cell
The inhibitor binds to lactose and stops inhibiting
The other proteins get produced
Which kinda looks like “in the presence of an actual tiger, the fear repression stops working and you actually do run away”.
There’s a bunch of theories for this, the main theories are that double repression can respond faster (because once you turn off the X-repressor, there’s already lots of X around to do something) and that they have tighter control (low levels of X are fine, a little bit of X being produced doesn’t mess anything up). But I’m not actually sure if these are both true or even fully make sense.
There’s a general fun fact here, biological systems love double/multiple suppression circuits. In your example:
The emotion of “fear” suppresses the behaviour of “taking a scary path”
Emotional suppression suppresses the “fear”
Similarly, lots of biochemical pathways look something like:
Ambidextrase C suppresses promeloid protein LLB
Mothin 2b suppresses Ambidextrase C, allowing promeloid protein LLB to be synthesized
Or, to give a real example:
The Lac operon in bacteria controls a bunch of proteins for taking up and processing lactose. By default, these proteins are produced.
One of the produced proteins is actually an inhibitor, which turns off all the Lac-controlled proteins (including itself) maintaining them at a low level
If lactose is present, the (small amounts of) lactose uptake protein let it into the cell
The inhibitor binds to lactose and stops inhibiting
The other proteins get produced
Which kinda looks like “in the presence of an actual tiger, the fear repression stops working and you actually do run away”.
There’s a bunch of theories for this, the main theories are that double repression can respond faster (because once you turn off the X-repressor, there’s already lots of X around to do something) and that they have tighter control (low levels of X are fine, a little bit of X being produced doesn’t mess anything up). But I’m not actually sure if these are both true or even fully make sense.