Woman Who Feels No Fear

The corridor is dark, the walls are close, and somewhere ahead of the little group a door bangs open that nobody touched. The visitors do what visitors to a haunted house are supposed to do: they clutch at each other’s sleeves, they slow down, they scream when a figure in a monstrous mask lunges out of the blackness at them.

All of them, that is, except one.

She is at the front, leading the way, calling back cheerfully for the others to follow her. When the masked actors leap out, she does not jump, and she does not shriek. She laughs. She chats with the monsters. And at one point, out of plain curiosity about what the costume might feel like, she reaches out and pokes one of them — startling the actor far more than he managed to startle her.

The researchers walking behind her that night were not surprised. They had brought her to the Waverly Hills Sanatorium haunted house on purpose, as one stop in years of gentle, careful attempts to do something that turned out to be impossible by ordinary means: to frighten a woman known to science only as S.M.

What is broken inside her brain?

Deep inside the brain, one on each side, sit two small structures shaped roughly like almonds. They are called the amygdalae, and although they are involved in several jobs, their most famous task is sounding the alarm. When your eyes and ears report something dangerous — a snake on the path, a stranger too close in the dark — the amygdala helps trigger the body’s response before you have even finished thinking: the heart pounds, the palms sweat, the muscles prepare to run or to fight.

In S.M., those alarm bells have been destroyed. She has an extremely rare genetic condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease; Smithsonian Magazine notes that only around 400 cases are known in the world. Among its effects, the disease leaves calcium deposits in the brain, and in her case those deposits settled in the amygdalae, slowly hardening them until, as one researcher put it, the fear centre was effectively gone.

The damage appears to have taken hold around the end of her childhood. She remembers being frightened as a little girl — she recalls not wanting to touch a big catfish her father had caught — and the Iowa researchers note that her last reported experience of fear was at about the age of ten. After that, silence from the alarm system, for the rest of her life.

It is important to understand what the disease did not take from her. Her intelligence is normal. Her other feelings work: when researchers showed her film clips chosen to stir different emotions, she responded to the sad, happy, angry, disgusting and surprising scenes much as anyone would. Only the fear scenes left her untouched. One single instrument in the orchestra has gone quiet; the music otherwise plays on.

What have scientists actually tested?

S.M. has been studied for many years by researchers at the University of Iowa, including the neuroscientist Justin Feinstein, and their 2011 study — reported in the journal Current Biology — is the most thorough attempt ever made to map her missing emotion.

The haunted house was only one test among many. The team took her to an exotic pet shop, even though she told them she hated snakes and spiders and tried to avoid them. What happened next surprised even Feinstein. She walked straight up to the snakes and began touching them, calm and fascinated, and at one point the researchers actually had to stop her from poking a large, dangerous tarantula. Asked why she was handling creatures she claimed to hate, she seemed puzzled by her own behaviour and said that curiosity had simply taken over.

Back in the laboratory, she watched clips from horror films that make ordinary viewers flinch and look away. She found them interesting, sometimes entertaining — never frightening. The team also gave her detailed questionnaires about fear, from fear of death to fear of speaking in public, and asked her to keep a diary of her emotions over three months. Across all of it — the forms, the diary, the films, the animals, the haunted corridors — fear simply never appeared. Not once.

Curiosity appeared everywhere instead. Where the rest of us pull back, she leans in: approaching, touching, asking questions, striking up conversations with ghouls. She also, tellingly, cannot easily read fear on the faces of other people, even though she recognises happiness or sadness without trouble. The emotion is missing from her inner world in both directions — she neither feels it nor readily sees it.

Has anything ever scared her?

Life itself has run the cruellest tests of all, without any scientists present. Reviewing her history, the Iowa team recorded events that would leave most people shaken for years. A man held a knife against her throat in a park. She has been threatened at gunpoint. She has survived domestic violence that nearly cost her life. Her responses were real — she reports anger and distress at such moments — but fear, by her own account, was absent, and none of these events left the lingering trauma that usually follows. In the park, astonishingly, she talked back to the man holding the knife, and he let her go.

For decades, then, the honest scientific answer seemed to be: no, nothing frightens her.

Then came 2013, and an experiment that changed the answer. Feinstein’s team reasoned that the amygdala also watches over the inside of the body, reacting, for example, when the level of carbon dioxide in the blood rises — a possible sign of suffocation. They predicted that without an amygdala, inhaling CO2-rich air would leave their patients unmoved. S.M. and two other women with the same rare disease breathed in air containing 35 percent carbon dioxide through a mask, alongside twelve healthy volunteers.

Every prediction collapsed. All three patients panicked — more strongly, in fact, than the healthy volunteers did. S.M. reported being frightened that she was suffocating, that she might die. It was, researchers say, the first time she had felt fear since childhood.

The lesson scientists took from that startling result is a subtle and important one. Fear of things in the outside world — snakes, heights, attackers, haunted houses — seems to travel through the amygdala. But the body also keeps a second, deeper alarm for dangers arising within, and that alarm can ring even when the first one has been destroyed. Her brain had not lost the capacity for fear entirely. It had lost one of fear’s two great doorways.

Is living without fear a gift or a curse?

If you ask people to imagine a life without fear, most picture something like freedom: no anxiety, no dread, no 3 a.m. worries. And there is genuinely light in S.M.’s story. She describes herself as a happy person on most days. People who meet her notice how open and friendly she is — she stands closer to others than most of us would, and trusts easily.

But the scientists who know her best do not call her lucky. In the conclusion of their study, Feinstein and his colleagues wrote that her behaviour leads her again and again back towards the very situations she ought to be avoiding, and they describe the consequences for her as severe. Again and again, missing the alarm has meant walking towards the knife, the gun, the dangerous animal, the unsafe street at night — because nothing inside her shouted stop. That she has survived all of it is, in the researchers’ own judgement, remarkable.

To me, her life quietly rearranges how fear itself looks. Fear is usually filed away in our minds as a weakness, an embarrassment, something brave people conquer. S.M.’s story suggests it is closer to pain: unpleasant, sometimes overwhelming, occasionally set off by nothing at all — yet built into us as a form of protection, a loyal, noisy guardian we only truly value when we imagine its absence. The racing heart before you step back from the cliff edge is not your enemy. It is the oldest safety device you own.

Common questions

Is S.M.’s real name known? No. She is identified in research only by the initials S.M., to protect her privacy — protection that matters more than usual in her case, because her trusting, fearless nature could make her easy for others to take advantage of.

Does she understand that things are dangerous? Yes, in the thinking part of her mind. She knows a hot pan will burn and that a snake can bite. What is missing is the body’s alarm — the racing heart, the urge to pull back. Knowledge arrives; the feeling that normally enforces it does not.

Can she feel emotions besides fear? Yes. Happiness, sadness, anger, disgust and surprise have all been observed in her and in her own reports. Fear is the specific gap, which is exactly what makes her case so valuable to science.

Could this research help people who feel too much fear? That is the hope. Conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder involve a fear system that fires too hard and too often, and understanding how the brain builds fear — and how it can be reached by more than one route — may guide kinder treatments one day. There is no such treatment yet, and her case is one person, so scientists are careful not to promise too much.

Sources

The story above is offered as general information about a famous research case; it is not medical advice.