The (Wo)man Without Fear

Posted on February 4, 2022 by OAFE

Today's Gung-Ho review brought this oddity to mind:

User thefloatingrose said: Today I Learned of a woman known as Patient S.M, who has no amygdala, which is the part of the brain responsible for fear. As a result she is unable to feel fear or read negative social cues, and doesn't understand personal space. The only time she ever felt fear is when a test was held replicating suffocation. User armedandgayngerous said: Science: wow this person has never felt fear. Let's fix that
User absolxguardian said: For everyone who says this is effed up, SM volunteered to have the extent of her fear immunity (and other neurodivergence-like symptoms) studied. Of course scientists jumped on it. They started with horror movies (she enjoyed them, but didn’t feel fear) and other scary things in a controlled environment. They also tested her ability to feel other emotions and relate to other scenes from films. The suffocation simulation involved the direction injection of CO2 into her bloodstream. There was also a control group of nuerotypical people. The interesting part is that she was more freaked out than they were, likely because the control group could temper their fear with the knowledge that they weren’t in any real danger. But she is unable to process context clues in regards to fear. This was in 1994, so an ethics board was involved and this provided us very useful insight into the neurological nature of fear and the purpose of the amygdala. Also she’s almost been murdered on multiple occasions. This is one of the least dangerous things that's happened to her.
User ottermatopoeia posted an edit of the "Teen Comix" meme, where the first panel shows a boy in a T-shirt that says "No Fear", the second panel shows someone wearing a shirt that says "Suffocation", and the final panel shows him now wearing a shirt that says "One Fear"
User hawkeyedflame said: i think the most interesting thing about this is that it implies the fear of suffocation is not something that is processed or propagated by the amygdala, which is a rather new part of the brain compared to the brain stem. fear of suffocation is a far deeper, older, and more instinctual fear, something so deep that even creatures without a limbic system might experience it.

We'd call this a made-up piece of canon, but since it's straight from Hasbro, how is that different from any other fact about him?

And now, some more OAFEry:
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