The amygdala (the brain has two of them, one in each hemisphere) is sometimes described as almond-shaped and referred to as “the seat of fear”. When prodded (and Morrison and his ministers have been taking a cattle prod to the nation’s amygdalas in recent days, warning us of multiple Armageddons) the amygdala gets us into a state of pulse-quickened, muscle-tensed, pupil-dilating anticipation.

And in these same few days in which the nation’s amygdalas are being cunningly stimulated by politicians, some of the nation’s brain’s bliss-registering places have been stimulated by Kate Miller-Heidke’s deserving win in last Saturday’s Eurovision-Australia Decides.

Back to that blissful outcome, to how Mozart will be on our team, Kate’s and Australia’s, when Kate performs at the Eurovision Song Contest 2019 in Tel-Aviv in May, in a few moments.

PM Morrison, a Machiavellian student of neuroscience, gave an amygdala-goading address to the National Press Club on Monday.

He seemed to address every international and local, neighbourhood dread that might be agitating electors’ bosoms. Sometimes he catalogued them (“people smuggling, natural disasters, organised crime, money laundering, biosecurity hazards, cyber security, the evil ice trade, violence against women”), assuring the fearful that they had every right to be scared. Meanwhile, though, he told the shuddering nation it could rely on his big, burly, protective government, tuned as it is to “deal with the world as it is - uncertain, often dangerous, uncompromising, and at its worst - simply evil”.

Here, bringing evil into it, you could tell that as a fundamentalist Christian he dearly wanted to start referring to Satan. The word “Beelzebub” hovered on his lips. But no doubt his advisers have wisely advised him to hide his Pentecostal extremes from an increasingly agnostic electorate.

But given his tone it was as if, one enthralled reporter-commentator wrote, the Liberals have “read the electorate and found a bunch of really scared people” whose votes are to be wooed, voters who may “be looking for simple certainties in a complex world”.

Will it work for the amygdala-spinning Liberals, this artful employment of fake spectres, of contrived poltergeists? Politicians are scathing about “scaremongering” when their opponents do it but every party political Machiavelli knows that voters are an easily stampeded species.

We evolved to be fearful and hyperwary, Duke University psychology and neuroscience professor Ahmad Hariri has told the New York Times, and this served us well when we were primitive and lived savage lives full of real dangers.

“[But] change has occurred so rapidly for our species that now we are equipped with brains that are super sensitive to threat but also super capable of planning, thinking, forecasting and looking ahead. So we essentially drive ourselves nuts worrying about things because we have too much time and don’t have many real threats on our survival, so fear gets expressed in … really strange, maladaptive ways.”

But turning away from the nation’s alarmed amygdalas, we go to what neuroscientists like to call the brain’s “hedonic hot spots”. They are where our “liking” responses are enhanced, where bliss is made.

And bliss was kindled by Kate Miller-Heidke’s triumph in Eurovision – Australia Decides. Her song/act was that rare thing in the Eurovision context (your columnist has been a Eurovision tragic for decades, engrossed by its hypnotic awfulness), a thing of originality and excellence and flair.

It was memorable, when the essence of most Eurovision songs/acts is that, flimsy trash, they only linger in the memory for about the time that anything lingers in the memory of a goldfish. I sat, transfixed, through the 2018 grand and glittering 63rd Eurovision Cong Contest final from Lisbon, the 26 third-rate songs/acts passing through my attention, leaving no trace, like 26 events in the evening of a forgetful goldfish, like a typical Question Time in the House of Representatives making no mark on a cultured person. For cultured people (like this boutique column’s readers), the coming federal election campaign, too, will have this same Eurovisonish quality. Nothing said or done will have any excellence about it to enable it to Velcro itself to our attentions and memories.

But the accomplished Kate’s song/act, Zero Gravity, all her own composition, is different. Go online and see it now.

Those of you who know opera will see/hear at once that Kate’s fabulous costume, the vocal gymnastics she does with her supple voice, owe something to the Queen of the Night’s hair-raising, amygdala-disturbing aria in Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

It’s not that Kate and the witch-Queen are singing about the same thing. Kate’s song (unintelligible, in the great Eurovision tradition) is said to be about post-natal depression whereas the bitter and mystically twisted Queen is shrilling about murderous revenge.

But no matter. We go to Tel-Aviv in May (what a welcome distraction this true Eurovision will be from the pseudo-Eurovision of our federal election campaign) with the Big Man, Mozart, on our team and with something excellently Australian to display to an estimated 190 million of the world’s folk. How the prospect switches on an Aussie patriot’s hedonic hot spots!