8 ms·
Woman With No Fear Intrigues Scientists
- rokhayakebe 16y agoNot only does she not fear, but it appears she cannot assess danger (picked up a snake).
- adammichaelc 16y agoIf you aren't afraid of the snake, what's the danger?
- sandipc 16y agothat it bites you and kills you? Fear is not a requirement for that to happen.
- shawndumas 16y agonot all snakes are poisonous.
- eli 16y agoThe vast majority of snakes are not a danger to humans.
- srean 16y agoIts only a tiny fraction of all snakes that are poisonous and of them, not all are deadly to humans. But this is largely irrelevant because the chances are high that the snake in front of you has not been sampled uniformly from the distribution of all snakes. A lot of factors dictate the statistical make up of a snake that one may encounter and its aggression level. Geography, weather and time of the year play an important role. Let me give an anecdotal example. My college has a reputation with snakes, so much so that pea-cocks were artificially introduced to control their population. I would hazard a conservative guess that 50% of all students encounter a snake in close proximity every year. These are almost always a cobra, krait or local species of a viper. All extremely poisonous. Nonetheless in the entire history of the institution there has not been a single instance of a snake bite, and they have actually stopped stocking on anti-venom. But unless you are trained to handle snakes, picking them up is certainly not wise and my prior would be high that she did not have such a training.
- kragen 16y agoThis varies a lot by location. I guess you're in India, where there are lots of dangerous snakes. It sounds like SM is in North America, where there are only four poisonous snakes — cottonmouth, rattlesnake, copperhead, and coral snake — and they're all pretty easy to identify, and for the most part, not very aggressive. The vast majority of individual snakes in most parts of the US aren't one of these types, especially in urban areas.
- srean 16y agoYou guessed correctly about my college. What I found fascinating was the difference in aggression level of the same species at different times of the year. The speed of their strike also blew me away. But they can cover very short distances with that, so the trained handlers would pick them up like nothing. But back to fear and reflexes. I had the opportunity to study one of the aggressive ones very closely in a protective enclosure. How much ever I resolved not to flinch when it lunged at me, I would invariably jump back a pace. The override is just way too strong to control consciously even when you can anticipate it and want to counter it. Even when you know you are not in any danger. What I find interesting is that I dont think we are hardwired to fear snakes, it is learned. The hardwired bit might relate to sudden motion though.
- Semiapies 16y agoYou're correct - fear of snakes is not instinctual in humans. Most young primates will avoid a snake, while a young child who hasn't been taught otherwise will blithely walk over and pick one up.
- srean 16y agoI upvoted you for confirming my hunch. But not sure why it did not get added.
- jemfinch 16y agoAren't cottonmouths just a non-descript black color?
- jemfinch 16y agoActually, I don't think any are poisonous. Many are venomous, though.
- archgoon 16y agoHuh, I had forgotten about this distinction, thank you.
- corin_ 16y agoThe problem is that the article doesn't specify if it was a dangerous snake or not, it's possible she recognised the type and knew it was safe to pick it up. However, you'd have to say that fear of animals like this is a pretty good evolutionary development designed to protect us from threats where are own knowledge doesn't let us know for sure if it's safe or not (i.e. when it comes to snakes, most of us won't recognise how safe or not a snake is, so it's safer for us to be afraid of all of them.)
- joshrule 16y agoThose two are not necessarily related, though. For example, poor understanding of a situation can lead to wild misjudgments of danger, whether or not someone experiences fear.
- endtime 16y agoYeah, from the article it doesn't even necessarily sound like she's incapable of a panic response to highly negative situations so much as she doesn't consider that many situations to be highly negative.
- Semiapies 16y agoShe perhaps assessed enough potential danger to move the snake away from her children.
- wakeup 16y agodont do this to people. please. war is the problem not fear. If you eliminate fear you just create retards. People will so abuse this... have phun future!
- srean 16y agoWhile one may want to be fearless or without the ability to feel pain, they are essential emotions and sensations. The lack of either can be life threatening. Its common among those who cannot feel pain to have bitten of their tongue or crushed their own teeth or jaw bone. Inability to feel pain is often accompanied by inability to sense temperature. People afflicted by this disease rarely live beyond their 20s. The reason being that they cannot monitor and correct for their bodies inner core temperature. The run a way fever or hypothermia turns fatal.
- powrtoch 16y agoPain, yes. Fear, debatable. Fear plays a role in helping people to assess danger, and in making decisions related to your survival and well being. Neither of these things require a fear response though. The article mentions that the woman might have found herself in dangerous situations more often due to her inability to fear, but at best this means that fear might be a useful addition to our ability to assess danger. It seems to me that the vast majority of situations that are dangerous are either a) obviously so, or b) the opposite. In obviously dangerous situations, you should be able to pick up on the danger by common sense and act accordingly (I don't feel fear every time I cross the street, but I also don't step out in front of cars). In situations where the danger element is very hidden away, it's unlikely you'd get a fear response anyway, since your intuition is only as good as its input. That leaves a third category, that for which the danger is non-obvious, but fear gives us an evolved intuitive-response to be wary. My argument would be that this is a small and constantly shrinking class of situations, because the environment most of us find ourselves in is so strikingly different than the one in which we evolved. You might have an evolved, intuitive fear response to the sound of a lion's roar, but this does no good whatsoever for most people in the world. So most of the dangerous situations we actually encounter, we deal with using reason and learned behavior rather than fear instinct. That's my stance anyway. The only area in which I can see a concrete use for fear is its ability to stimulate a very quick flight reaction in certain dangerous situations. That is, things that you need to react to before you have time to think them through. Again, less common in the modern western world, but it does put at least one point in the pro-fear column.
- 16y ago
- joshrule 16y agoIt's interesting that most of her other emotions function normally. It was my understanding that the amygdala facilitated a number of emotions, not just fear. Am I wrong?
- woodall 16y agoYou are correct, however, it is commonly accepted that sensory stimuli is the primary function of this nerve bundle. One thing I think everyone agrees on is that, the amygdala is responsible for most social learning processes;fear and anger being a few of those learning experiences. >After this point, neither the concrete definition as to the extent of the amygdala is not clear, nor is the exact function of each of its subgroups. In the amygdala region alone, there is much controversy surrounding the nuclear subgroups, resulting in classifications that range between 5 and 22 different groups within the amygdala itself. "The Role of the Amygdala in Fear and Panic". http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1749 http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1749
- alexwestholm 16y ago"The diary also had her indicate emotions she was feeling from a list of 50 items. Her average score of fear was 0 percent, while for other emotions she showed normal functioning." Far apart from the brain structure involved, what amazed me the most is the severability of fear from other emotions. For someone untrained in neuroscience and coming purely from an experiential point of view, it seems impossible that one emotion could be completely absent without having any effects on the functioning of others. For instance, even with an emotion like happiness, it seems like there's some component of the feeling that relates to the enjoyment of being free of fearful things. Perhaps the emotions don't actually function the same, but her perception of them is similar to unaffected patients?
- dawgr 16y agoI think it has to do with how primitive or instinctive the emotion is. I'd bet that fear is one of the oldest emotions, after all every animal experiences fear as far as I know. Many of the other emotions are restricted to apes, specially humans. I'd say a dog can't be happy or sad, just excited or not excited. If those human emotions evolved thousands of years apart there is a good chance that they are at different parts of the brain.
- Monkeyget 16y agoFearlessness is a trait of psychopaths. It appears that the amygdala is dysfunctional in psychopaths : " the amygdala is crucial for stimulus–reinforcement learning and responding to emotional expressions, particularly fearful expressions that, as reinforcers, are important initiators of stimulus–reinforcement learning. Moreover, the amygdala is involved in the formation of both stimulus–punishment and stimulus–reward associations. Individuals with psychopathy show impairment in stimulus–reinforcement learning (whether punishment or reward based) and responding to fearful and sad expressions. It is argued that this impairment drives much of the syndrome of psychopathy. Stimulus–reinforcement learning is crucial for socialization, for learning that some things are bad to do, and individuals with psychopathy fail to take advantage of standard socialization techniques." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2606709/?tool=pmcentrez http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2606709/?tool=pm...
- gyardley 16y agoResearch into this could have clear and fascinating military applications. They're already well aware that a controlled psychopath is an asset: https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg.nsf/0/bd7eed04567bfe2b85256e3b002f29c1?OpenDocument https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg.nsf/0/bd7eed04567bfe2b85...
- tomjen3 16y agoThe danger is that psychopath with a gun is _really_, _really_ difficult to control.
- anigbrowl 16y agoInteresting, though somewhat disturbing. Using this research to select from nature's random yield is one thing, but leads one into something of an ethical minefield. Inducing or enhancing similar characteristics by neural modification would be bad, but people who already exhibit such pathologies wouldn't find that troubling at all. The author seems a olittle overly-assured of his conclusions but that may just be the result of the short article form - the bibliography seems worth a look. 3-4% of the adult male population is a higher incidence than I'd have expected.
- Groxx 16y ago>Researchers put out their best foot to try to scare the patient, who they refer to as "SM" in their write-up in the most recent issue of the journal Current Biology. Haunted houses, where monsters tried to evoke an avoidance reaction, instead evoked curiosity; spiders and snakes didn't do the trick; and a battery of scary film clips entertained SM. The rest of the article aside: I don't think that's quite conclusive. After a few such trials, it'd get merely interesting or boring, and I have to wonder how skilled at frightening specific people researchers can ever be. On a more fundamental level, I highly doubt you can even perform an accurate test along these lines with a person's consent. "People" as a whole? Easy, someone's always afraid of something at-hand. A single person, who knows what you're doing? Unlikely. Case in point: a little work with acclimating to spiders, and I'd pass those tests with flying colors. Haunted houses and scary film clips fall somewhere between mild amusement at the attempt and outright boredom, and I like snakes. Plus, snakes don't have legs / claws; get the head under control, and you're fine.
- cheriot 16y ago"Previous studies with this patient revealed she can't recognize fear in facial expressions, but it was unknown if she had the ability to experience fear herself." People have been say "it takes one to know one" for a long time, but real evidence that we can't recognized something unless we have that same capacity within ourselves would be piercing. Tell me again why are so many self proclaimed good people are convinced that everyone else is evil?
- Natsu 16y ago> but real evidence that we can't recognized something unless we have that same capacity within ourselves would be piercing. It would be difficult to find someone with no capacity for evil, wouldn't it?
- known 16y agoI think she is suffering from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASPD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASPD
- itisfritz 16y agoThis woman has not met me....
- chopsueyar 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_palin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_palin
- ScottBurson 16y agoThis woman has missed her calling. She could be one of the greatest poker players the world has ever known.
- geoffw8 16y agoIMO, your arguing with evolution. Its there for a reason.