Hum Posted December 20, 2010 Share Posted December 20, 2010 NEW YORK ? Meet SM, a 44-year-old woman who literally knows no fear. She's not afraid to handle snakes. She's not afraid of the "The Blair Witch Project," "The Shining," or "Arachnophobia." When she visited a haunted house, it was a monster who was afraid of her. SM isn't some cold-blooded psychopath or a hero with a tight rein on her emotions. She's an ordinary mother of three with a specific psychological impairment, the result of a very rare genetic disease that damaged a brain structure called the amygdala. Her case shows that the amygdala plays a key role in making people feel afraid in threatening situations, researchers say. She apparently hasn't felt fear as an adult, not even 15 years ago in an incident described by the researchers. A man jumped up from a park bench, pressed a knife to her throat and hissed, "I'm going to cut you." SM, who heard a church choir practicing in the distance, looked coolly at him and replied, "If you're going to kill me, you're going to have to go through my God's angels first." The man suddenly let her go. She didn't run home. She walked. "Her lack of fear may have freaked the guy out," Feinstein said. But it also got her into that situation in the first place, he noted. SM had willingly approached the man when he asked her to, even though it was late at night and she was alone, and even though she thought he looked "drugged out." A study of her fearlessness was published online Thursday in the journal Current Biology by University of Iowa researcher Justin Feinstein and colleagues. more Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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