A woman who can't feel fear
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Fear, pain, guilty - the gifts no one appreciates.
I do get gwern's implication of fear being a gift. His applauding of fear was (presumably) in response to Rachel Feltman's (WashingtonPost's journalist) "a bad thing" appraisal of her lack of fear during those two incidents of being held at knifepoint and those two other incidents of being held at gunpoint. Whereas you completely miss the point I was trying to make. That, it matters not that in her entire lifetime she failed to feel afraid in those four instances (of being held at knifepoint or gunpoint) -- and we do not yet know if she actually handled them intelligently or not (i.e., had the time and energy to think through her responses instead of them being, say, flippantly knee-jerk) -- as they are nothing in the large scheme of an entire of life of being mostly happy. Say, she has lived for some 50 years with this condition, then she has been happy the whole 45 years. An ordinary "healthy person" would have been happy say 25 years with ordinary "healthy" incidents of fear, even trauma, peppered throughout their lifetime.
> She describes herself to be happy 9 out of 10 times because she is also unable to notice the real dangers [...]
What 'real dangers' are they (other than the four incidences noted above)?
> [...] real dangers that fear is there to help us handle.
How exactly does fear help you handle 'real dangers'? It seems that SM had no trouble handling those four incidents (of being held at knifepoint or gunpoint) admirably. Most "healthy people" on the other hand would cringe/freeze and even develop "traumas", much less have the energy to think through their responses.
> While it may be great to not feel afraid, as the article points out it also leads her to risky behaviour that most healthy persons would avoid.
You are merely speculating trying to justify your fear of lack of fear, unless by 'risky behaviour' you only refer to those four incidents (of being held at knifepoint or gunpoint) which this women seems to have handled admirably.
Being fearless is indeed under appreciated, even at HN.
I don't mind feeling fear occasionally if it helps me live out my natural lifespan.
Could you elaborate on what you are getting at here? Who are these other people, who are likewise fearless (like SM), that are not around to be studied & interviewed? I'm asking if there is an evidenced based count, or if you are purely speculating. Say, if there are 19 other people like SM with no fear, and all 19 of them of died due their frisky disregard for some 'risky behaviour' or 'real danger' ... then, I would accept that fear is indeed a gift.
> I don't mind feeling fear occasionally if it helps me live out my natural lifespan.
It is not just about the initial feeling of fear -- even then I hardly think fear helps a modern human live out his natural lifespan, as intelligence does a much better job of it -- but also the lack of fear-induced complex emotions, such as separation anxiety. Also it helps to remember that stress (much of it based on fear) shorten the said lifespan tremendously. So you may very well be looking at negligible loss vs substantial profit.
It seems to me that SM is the first candidate to demonstrate that fear can be disregarded like an appendage in modern times. All that these scientists could come up with over the years to justify their (and the general public's) fear of lack of fear is those four incidents of being held at knifepoint and gunpoint.
People who were not survivors of 4 (and counting) violent assaults with deadly weapons, or of other dangerous behavior which might have not have happened if they had functioning fear.
> I'm asking if there is an evidenced based count, or if you are purely speculating.
I think the burden of proof here should be on anyone who thinks that lacking fear is great. If so, why does the rare disorder not spread? Why is fear an almost universal and evolutionarily-conserved emotion? Why does the only cited example lead an extraordinarily risky life? (How many white female artists ever get held up like that? Or 4 times? Hell of a coincidence...)
> All that these scientists could come up with over the years to justify their (and the general public's) fear of lack of fear is those four incidents of being held at knifepoint and gunpoint.
'All'?
You tried to counter it first by lumping fear together with pain.
Next, you tried to counter it by pointing to some hypothetical group of fearless people that were dead specifically due to lacking fear. I asked if you could point who these people were. I'm genuinely curious to learn and understand how in modern times -- where people with their elaborate plans, not snakes with their instantaneous attacks, are the common threat -- a person of average or above intelligence could end up risking their own lives without having to involve fear.
Your argument for evolutionary conservation doesn't hold at all. Intelligence evolved fairly recently (in evolutionary terms) and thus, pending genetic tampering by us, it should take a plenty of time for any such adaptations to be successful. Besides, fear was indeed essential to us prior to intelligence evolving, as the quick and dirty survival mechanism of instincts was all that we had to survive and reproduce successfully.
> Why does the only cited example lead an extraordinarily risky life?
What I'm asking, specifically, is: are their other (cited or non-cited) examples of a woman or a man with no fear whatsoever leading an ordinary or below-ordinary life? I'm more that happy rescind all that I've written to you here if you could successfully provide them. After all, you have a track record of doing meticulous research.
> How many white female artists ever get held up like that? Or 4 times? Hell of a coincidence...
Are you suggesting that those 4 gunpoint/knifepoint perpetrators were influenced to do so, in part, due to SM being fearless? It really is hard to say without understanding her life context. Besides, this is going down the speculative path.
>> All that these scientists could come up with over the years to justify their (and the general public's) fear of lack of fear is those four incidents of being held at knifepoint and gunpoint. > 'All'?
Yes -- and I'm not too sure what you were aiming to point here -- I took the liberty to assume that people like Antonio Damasio wanted to specifically find out/ bring out incidents from her life to buttress their opinion of fear being essential even to modern humans (he did say this in his book 'The Emotional Brain'). Of course, these scientists are also interested in the larger goal of understanding fear itself -- they have published a plenty of useful material -- but it also helps to know they have biases of their own to bring to the table.
> SM is indeed that proof -- she is admirably surviving without fear, and being mostly happy at it as well.
When a nuclear power plant nearly melts down, there are two possible reactions.
One is to infer that the plant design is less safe that calculated, and reason accordingly.
The other is to say, 'hey, the plant almost melted down but it didn't actually melt down! Nuclear power plants must be really safe! This is great!'
Which do you think you are doing?
(In statistical terminology, we are dealing with heavily censored data: deaths are not recorded because of the rarity of the disorder, and we have a filtered distribution of only the datapoints/people still functional enough to have survived at all. If one of the uncensored datapoints, or the only datapoint, is an extreme outlier on a variable, such as experienced violence, that implies the whole distribution will be as or more extreme outliers.)
If you are using this expression to express frustration, exasperation, annoyance[1] - say so explicitly, I'll stop right here. My experience indicates that when people are frustrated at any point during a conversation involving strongly held personal beliefs, it is best to let sleeping dogs lie, as that is usually the best for both the parties.
[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for_goodness'_sake
>> SM is indeed that proof -- she is admirably surviving without fear, and being mostly happy at it as well. > When a nuclear power plant nearly melts down, there are two possible reactions. > One is to infer that the plant design is less safe that calculated, and reason accordingly. > The other is to say, 'hey, the plant almost melted down but it didn't actually melt down! > Nuclear power plants must be really safe! This is great!' > Which do you think you are doing?
So that is your third attempt to counter? Be that as it may, SM admirably surviving those four incidents is nothing at all like your analogy; there is no nuclear plant to nearly melt down (she actually survived those four incidents). What I'm doing, then, is to point out that she actually survived (despite the lack of fear), and on top of that, I'm saying that fear is overrated. You are saying that fear is a gift, and I requested for those people you think actually needed fear to survive. Even if you could not provide citations, could you at least provide reasonable situations where a normal person would need the instinctual reaction of fear to survive in modern times?
> (In statistical terminology, we are dealing with heavily censored data: deaths are not recorded because of the rarity of the disorder, and we have a filtered distribution of only the datapoints/people still functional enough to have survived at all. If one of the uncensored datapoints, or the only datapoint, is an extreme outlier on a variable, such as experienced violence, that implies the whole distribution will be as or more extreme outliers.)
There are only 400 reported cases of the Urbach–Wiethe disease (what you refer to as the disorder). And only some of the 50–75% of thoses case affect the amygdala (which is associated with fear). Even that subset doesn't necessarily experience a complete a loss of fear as SM did. So it is not just about deaths not being recorded. It may very well be that SM is the only patient with complete loss of fear, out of all those patients with Urbach–Wiethe disease. Indeed many patients actually suffer mood, anxiety and psychotic disorders (hardly an indication of lack of fear). To summarize, it makes no sense to use the dataset -- censored or not -- of people with Urbach–Wiethe disease, as not all of them experience complete lack of fear. Even if there are patients other than SM with complete lack of fear, we do not know the cause of their death to make any conclusion as to their lack of fear being the cause of their death (such as to continue treating fear as a gift, appreciated or not).
Only some types of neuropathy are like that (and there are many kinds). In other cases there are no sensations at all.
In my interactions with her, SM was uniformly happy, and it's my impression that she's like that in everyday life as well. A former labmate, Justin Feinstein, wrote an interesting paper based in part on observing her in real-world settings [1]. He didn't observe fear in any of a variety of potentially frightening contexts — she generally confronts such contexts with laughter or wonder.
Regarding love, she's deeply attached to her family. I distinctly remember stopping when we walked past the hospital chapel so that she could pray for members of her family. I can't say as much about grief, but she never seemed anxious in any of the time that we spent together, and she certainly never got angry or even upset.
And when he (they) concluded the paper by writing "[SM's] behavior, time and time again, leads her back to the very situations she should be avoiding, highlighting the indispensable role that the amygdala plays in promoting survival by compelling the organism away from danger." were they thinking of the experimental situations (snakes, haunt houses) in mind or real world situations? I ask because for someone living in a "poverty-stricken area replete with crime, drugs, and danger" at the age of 44 being held at knifepoint/ gunpoint 4 times seems par for the course.
Even so, what evidence is there that SM went back to the very situations she should be avoiding in real life (i.e., not experimental situations of poking snakes and monsters). For example, did she go back to the situation that put herself at knifepoint (the incident which she handled fearlessly by saying "go ahead and cut me")?
I can't help but think that the authors are bringing their own bias (that fear-response is essential in modern times) when concluding as that. I'm not a neuroscientist, but I'm very interested in the topic of fear.
Either there's just not enough material out there, or writers are very lazy, or these are essentially promos for the original show. In any case, if you consume science journalism with any appetite, this is pretty frustrating.
How about writing a new story, people?!
Well, she literally hasn't. So is she an Olympic champion who fights crime during the night and writes amazing novels during the day and commutes to work swimming together with a school of piranhas, or has she led a relatively normal life? She can follow her passion with no fear of failure or success or whatever!
I'm genuinely curious to find scientific evidence about whether fear is the only thing holding us back or there are other factors.
What stops her from killing herself out of curiosity ?
Would she make a better or worse soldier ?
I wish this woman did an AMA.
> I wonder if you can be truly depressed if you don't fear anything?
In the podcast, she does describe herself to be happy 9 out of 10 times.
> Or does her lack of fear not encompass anxiety?
I asked someone who had met her in person a similar question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8927905
I would say yes, often times depression manifests itself not as a feeling of fear or dread but as apathy. See for example Hugh Laurie's personal life [1,2] or Nine Inch Nails' Everyday is Exactly the Same[3] which captures that exact feeling. Or of course the wonderful Hyperbole and a Half's account of depression[4], especially the second part makes the point that depression at its worst is a void. No positive feelings, but also no negative ones.
Now I made myself sad^H^H^H apathetic going through those sources. Why does Trent Reznor have to be so good at projecting?
As for the anxiety bit (anxiety and depression are to completely different things), the article mentions her response to having her blood-co2 levels elevated, which seems to me to be a standard anxiety response. A feeling of restlessness and dread.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Laurie#Personal_Life [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2316880/Playing... (I know, I know, Daily mail but the quotes are worth it) [3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Aj9_8t1eQc [4] http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.nl/2011/10/adventures-in-d...
It is possible to rationally realize that dying would have negative utility, even failing to take into account fear of death.
In general, evolution tends to produce redundant systems for reproduction-critical activities.
Who knows, it might have conferred a survival advantage in our distant past--bands of nomadic hominids might have had to kill and even eat each other at times.
Perhaps they fail to empathize or sympathize with their "future self", which is who they view as the recipient of whatever it is they should be scared of currently.
Though of course, IANAP.
A number of early European explorers (including Champlain, if memory serves) describe ritual cannibalism--generally the consumption of prisoners, who were first tortured to death in that holistic and natural way First Peoples had--but also describe people starving to death in times of want without resorting to it.
In the case of this woman, her amygdalae have been damaged by Urbach-Wieth disease, which according to the article is extremely rare.
That said, it is likely that there is a wide distribution of various types of emotional response in the populace due to variations in neurological capability.
How is this not a contradiction in terms? Non-political humans seem impossible.
Or maybe it's our turn (the homo sapiens who have fear) turn to die out, letting more fearless ones take place. Although, this sounds more of a fictional novel waiting to be written.