A new study from the Brainlab has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience, as part of Emmanouela Kosteletou’s PhD research within the ERC project HumanSUBthreat, led by Judith Domínguez Borràs.

The article, entitled ‘A direct auditory subcortical route to the amygdala associated with fear in humans’, provides the first evidence in humans for a direct subcortical auditory pathway linking the inferior colliculus to the amygdala via the medial geniculate body, with a functional association to fear.

Using advanced diffusion MRI and tractography in 200 participants from the Human Connectome Project, the study identifies a robust colliculo-thalamo-amygdala pathway linked to both hearing ability in noise and self-reported fearfulness.

Importantly, this pathway differs from the classical cortical auditory route, pointing to a fast subcortical mechanism that may enable the brain to rapidly detect and respond to threatening sounds, even before full conscious processing.

These findings align with animal research and suggest that humans may share an evolutionarily conserved auditory “low road” for fear, extending current models of subcortical emotion beyond the visual domain. While a visual subcortical “low road” to the amygdala has been extensively described in humans, evidence for an equivalent auditory pathway had so far been limited to non-human animals. This study provides the first evidence that such a pathway may also exist in the human brain.

In the long term, this work may help to understand how alterations in subcortical affective circuitry contribute to anxiety and fear-related disorders.

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Article on Journal of Neuroscience:  https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1431-25.2026

See press release by the Society of Neuroscience in https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-03-brain-pathway-people-quickly-scary.html