Currently, two non-exclusive hypotheses are provided in the field of the neurophysiology of  fear to describe the circuitry involved. One of them (e.g., McNaughton & Corr, 2008) suggests a rostrocaudal hierarchy, with rostral structures detecting and processing potentially threatening stimuli and more caudal structures providing responses to proximate threats. Another model suggests that more caudal structures, such as the periaqueductal grey, provide the motor output of this fight/flight/freeze system, and threat detection and response selection occurs at higher levels (e.g., Fanselow, 1991). The reported results present the fascinating concept that, instead of (or in addition of) forming a hierarchical circuit, both threat detection and motor output are distributed at both levels - at least for proximal threats. The authors develop this idea by recording single units from the dPAG and VMHdm, both regions which have been shown to be involved in antipredatory behavior, in awake, behaving animals, and temporally correlating cell firing with behaviors indicative of risk assessment or flight/escape responses. Future exciting directions for this research include simultaneous lesion or activation paradigms combined with the electrophysiological approach reported here, to try to understand whether VMHdm-dPAG projections modulate the activity of the latter.