* An exciting clinical implication of this can be found in the recent work of Larry Cahill and Roger Pitman of Harvard. They report that if you block the sympathetic nervous system in someone who has just suffered a major trauma (with a drug from chapter 3 called a beta-blocker), you decrease the odds of the person developing post-traumatic stress disorder. What’s the rationale? Decrease the sympathetic signal to the amygdala, and the amygdala is less likely to decide that this is an event that should provoke wild arousal forever after.