What if you had no amygdala (the brain's tiny almond-shaped fear center)? A recent study tried to find out. The study, described here, looks at a woman referred to as SM who lost her amygdala to a rare childhood brain disease:
Experiments have strongly implicated the amygdala in fear processing. Many of these were conducted on animals with amygdala damage. “But one thing we’ve never known for sure, because they’re animals, is whether they can consciously feel fear,” says study coauthor Justin Feinstein of the University of Iowa in Iowa City. “So we said, ‘Let’s take a human patient who has this same sort of damage, and for the first time, actually figure out how they’re feeling.’”This, then, is fearlessness: A middle-aged woman who giggles in haunted houses and has an obsession with snakes. I.e., an aging goth chick. Weird, right?
Feinstein and his colleagues sifted through SM’s past, looking for instances when she should have been scared. SM said she never felt fear, even when threatened with a knife or a gun. The researchers gave SM an electronic diary that she carried for three months to record her emotional state. Fear didn’t make an appearance in the list of emotions. On a battery of questionnaires, SM wrote that she wasn’t afraid of public speaking, death, her heart beating too fast or being judged negatively in a social setting.
Next, the researchers did their best to scare SM. They showed her clips from The Blair Witch Project, The Shining and Silence of the Lambs: She was interested, but not afraid. The Waverly Hills Sanatorium Haunted House in Kentucky didn’t faze her. Instead of screaming, she laughed and poked one of the monsters in the head. The team took her to an exotic pet store with poisonous snakes and spiders. SM claimed to dislike the animals, but when she saw them she was overcome with curiosity, repeatedly asking to touch the snakes.
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