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While 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.

by srean 16y ago

While 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 ago
Pain, 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.
- srean 16y ago
  The adrenaline rush or the lack of could make a difference between life and death. I am thinking of heart attacks, modern western world notwithstanding. But I am not familiar the inner mechanics enough to claim that fear is a requisite for an adrenalin response. Some define fear as that hormonal response itself though. Even with regards to perception of danger, one's reaction, involvement and urgency can be quite different when it is accompanied by fear and when it is not. This of course does not always work in one's favor. So you have instances of "petrified with fear". But is it beneficial more often than not ? My gut feeling is yes. To add to you example of crossing a street: one can be rational about crossing streets. But when you suddenly realize you are about to be hit by a stray car, you do not have sufficient time to reason about relative velocities, trajectories and models of a driver's behavior. You just jump, hopefully out of the way, in fear/reflex. But I agree that our fear responses have lagged behind in relevance, with respect to our changing world. But that is true even with other biological preferences. Say with our preference for fatty food. Evolution is after all a high latency process. I believe personnel in hazardous situations are trained not to be insensitive to fear but to be choosy about what to fear and to react rationally to it....atleast in theory.
  - blahblahblah 16y ago
    Fear isn't required for an adrenalin response. I accidentally shocked myself with household 120V AC once (the back of my hand brushed up against a live exposed wire). My hand jerked away by reflex before I was even aware anything had happened. I did not experience any fear because the danger was already past before I was even aware there was any danger. I did, however, experience a strong adrenaline response immediately afterward. Granted, this is only anecdotal evidence, but it does suggest that adrenaline response without fear is possible even though it is generally the case that they occur concurrently.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  I think you underestimate how often fear comes into play. I recently was at the park with some kids and I noticed a couple of dogs playing... I then realized they were pitbulls. Maybe perfectly nice dogs, but my fear factor jumped through the roof and I quickly, but quietly gathered up all the kids. Now fear isn't something that kicks in often, but when it does it usually means you're in pretty grave danger. Not properly reacting to potentially life threatening situations, just once a year, likely greatly shortens your expected lifespan.
kadavy 16y ago
Not being able to feel pain is called Congenital Insensitivity to Pain. There's a great StuffYouShouldKnow Podcast about it: http://bit.ly/e0QWcg http://bit.ly/e0QWcg

by srean 16y ago

powrtoch 16y ago

Pain, 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.

srean 16y ago
The adrenaline rush or the lack of could make a difference between life and death. I am thinking of heart attacks, modern western world notwithstanding. But I am not familiar the inner mechanics enough to claim that fear is a requisite for an adrenalin response. Some define fear as that hormonal response itself though. Even with regards to perception of danger, one's reaction, involvement and urgency can be quite different when it is accompanied by fear and when it is not. This of course does not always work in one's favor. So you have instances of "petrified with fear". But is it beneficial more often than not ? My gut feeling is yes. To add to you example of crossing a street: one can be rational about crossing streets. But when you suddenly realize you are about to be hit by a stray car, you do not have sufficient time to reason about relative velocities, trajectories and models of a driver's behavior. You just jump, hopefully out of the way, in fear/reflex. But I agree that our fear responses have lagged behind in relevance, with respect to our changing world. But that is true even with other biological preferences. Say with our preference for fatty food. Evolution is after all a high latency process. I believe personnel in hazardous situations are trained not to be insensitive to fear but to be choosy about what to fear and to react rationally to it....atleast in theory.
- blahblahblah 16y ago
  Fear isn't required for an adrenalin response. I accidentally shocked myself with household 120V AC once (the back of my hand brushed up against a live exposed wire). My hand jerked away by reflex before I was even aware anything had happened. I did not experience any fear because the danger was already past before I was even aware there was any danger. I did, however, experience a strong adrenaline response immediately afterward. Granted, this is only anecdotal evidence, but it does suggest that adrenaline response without fear is possible even though it is generally the case that they occur concurrently.
kenjackson 16y ago
I think you underestimate how often fear comes into play. I recently was at the park with some kids and I noticed a couple of dogs playing... I then realized they were pitbulls. Maybe perfectly nice dogs, but my fear factor jumped through the roof and I quickly, but quietly gathered up all the kids. Now fear isn't something that kicks in often, but when it does it usually means you're in pretty grave danger. Not properly reacting to potentially life threatening situations, just once a year, likely greatly shortens your expected lifespan.

kadavy 16y ago

Not being able to feel pain is called Congenital Insensitivity to Pain. There's a great StuffYouShouldKnow Podcast about it: http://bit.ly/e0QWcg http://bit.ly/e0QWcg