Amygdala Excision Cures Arachnophobia

An interesting case study:

NewScientist reports that the 44-year-old businessman was suffering from sudden seizures caused by sarcoidosis. This rare condition can cause damage to the brain, and it was messing with the left portion of his amygdala.

Once it was removed, the man’s fear of spiders was gone. In fact, he went from being afraid to kill spiders by hand to actually wanting to touch and observe them close-up.

I’m not sure how good a desire to play with spiders is if you live in an area filled with brown recluses, tunnelwebs, or other spiders that are best avoided.

The amygdala has a very important purpose – see the threat, and then drive a search through the brain for the best cognitive solution that relieves the angst. If I see a spider, I feel the aversion, and then my amygdala detects the option of keeping my distance from the spider (or killing the spider), and that awareness keeps me away from the spider.

The fear isn’t much of a problem – evolution puts that right in through instinct. The trick is developing, through experience, pathways to resolve the fear into a solution that avoids the bad parts. If you can’t do that by any way other than removing the entire structure, you create more problems than you solve.

Liberals, through the use of false-reality-modeling, such as denying the presence of threat, do much the same thing. They turn off the amygdala without using a solution to the fear which triggered it in the first place.

Applied to politics and governance, it is no wonder the nation is on the fast track to bankruptcy and economic collapse.

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8 years ago

[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]

infowarrior1
8 years ago

Clearly the amygdala is dysfunctional in his case. One shouldn’t be having seizures when confronted with danger which only prevents oneself from deal with it in the 1st place.

Nathan
Nathan
8 years ago

You mentioned before pathways in the amgydala can’t be erased, but that people can learn to cope with them. Do you have a source or further reading on that?

Nathan
Nathan
Reply to  Anonymous Conservative
8 years ago

Interesting. You’d think that exposure to the stimulus itself would be more effective, like forcing himself to hold a spider on his hand.

Ronnie Richmond
8 years ago

But with irrational fear clouding out logic things can go from bad to worse. As a liberal with LOGIC, I know to stay away from spiders because I’m not an idiot. With conservatives, they need a prehistoric part of the brain to tell them not to do something. Seems sort of dumb if you ask me but then again look who I’m talking about.