NEW YORK – Meet SM, a 44-year-old woman who literally knows no fear.
She's not afraid to handle snakes. She's not afraid of the "The Blair Witch Project," "The Shining," or "Arachnophobia." When she visited a haunted house, it was a monster who was afraid of her.
SM isn't some cold-blooded psychopath or a hero with a tight rein on her emotions.
She's an ordinary mother of three with a specific psychological impairment, the result of a very rare genetic disease that damaged a brain structure called the amygdala (uh-MIG'-duh-luh).
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SM recalls being afraid as a child, like the time she was cornered by a snarling Doberman pinscher. But maybe that was before her disease wiped out the amygdala in both the left and right sides of her brain, the researchers say. She apparently hasn't felt fear as an adult, not even 15 years ago in an incident described by the researchers. A man jumped up from a park bench, pressed a knife to her throat and hissed, "I'm going to cut you."
SM, who heard a church choir practicing in the distance, looked coolly at him and replied, "If you're going to kill me, you're going to have to go through my God's angels first." The man suddenly let her go. She didn't run home. She walked.
"Her lack of fear may have freaked the guy out," Feinstein said.
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