Living without Fear

A woman with amygdala damage in her brain reveals what a fearless life implies

‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high… Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake’. Or so wrote Rabindranath Tagore. But perhaps poets don’t always have an idea of what they are invoking. Fear, in the human imagination, has always held a negative connotation, but it doesn’t take much thought to realise that we fear because fear serves a useful purpose. And now the case of a woman who lives a fearless life illustrates how vital a role fear does play.

In a paper in Current Biology, the authors of the study note: ‘Although clinical observations suggest that humans with amygdala damage have abnormal fear reactions and a reduced experience of fear, these impressions have not been systematically investigated. To address this gap, we conducted a new study in a rare human patient, SM, who has focal bilateral amygdala lesions. To provoke fear in SM, we exposed her to live snakes and spiders, took her on a tour of a haunted house, and showed her emotionally evocative films. On no occasion did SM exhibit fear, and she never endorsed feeling more than minimal levels of fear. Likewise, across a large battery of self-report questionnaires, three months of real-life experience sampling, and a life history replete with traumatic events, SM repeatedly demonstrated an absence of overt fear manifestations and an overall impoverished experience of fear. Despite her lack of fear, SM is able to exhibit other basic emotions and experience the respective feelings. The findings support the conclusion that the human amygdala plays a pivotal role in triggering a state of fear and that the absence of such a state precludes the experience of fear itself.’

The implication of this lack of fear was spelt out by Daniel Tranel, one of the authors, in a radio interview: “She has been repeatedly in situations that fear would have kept her out of, I mean, in a nutshell. She goes into unsafe situations, where a normal person would not even approach the situation. And, of course, she does this repeatedly and doesn’t avoid those situations and puts herself in harm’s way, as a consequence.”

About The Author

Hartosh Singh Bal