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.
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]
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.
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?
That was from The Human Amygdala.
I suspect with time, we will find that one way to deactivate an amygdala pathway that is more effective than the deconditioning described, is exposure to a much more salient stimulus which diverts attention from the primary pathway. Thus a guy gets stung by a spider, and develops a phobia. Then he gets thrown in combat, and bullets are flying everywhere, and he has to choose, get shot, or jump in a foxhole that may have a spider in it. Chances are he will jump in the foxhole, and his brain will down regulate the salience of the spider phobia. It is like worrying about your lawn going brown, a tornado begins to approach, and suddenly you don’t care about the lawn. If the tornado misses your house, it is almost relieving that your primary worry then becomes a browning lawn. I suspect you’ll see the same thing with liberals. Once apocalypse happens, and savages are running wild trying to degenitalize everyone with sharp insturments and take their possessions, that triggering microaggression when that guy didn’t refer to you by the gender indiscriminate positive pronoun “Xie” will seem much less important.
Milton Erickson used to exploit that to deal with phobias by scaring a person with something worse while they were exposed to the principle phobia. Suddenly they learned to ignore the principle phobia, supposedly after one usage of the technique in one case.
Interesting. You’d think that exposure to the stimulus itself would be more effective, like forcing himself to hold a spider on his hand.
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.